Career benefits associated with mentoring for mentors: A meta-analysis

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Highlights

  • Mentors were more satisfied with their jobs and committed to the organization.

  • Providing career mentoring was most associated with career success.

  • Providing psychosocial mentoring was most associated with organizational commitment.

  • Providing role modeling mentoring was most associated with job performance.

  • Mentoring quality was associated with mentor's job satisfaction and career success.

Abstract

Mentoring has been studied extensively as it is linked to protégé career development and growth. Recent mentoring research is beginning to acknowledge however that mentors also can accrue substantial benefits from mentoring. A meta-analysis was conducted where the provision of career, psychosocial and role modeling mentoring support were associated with five types of subjective career outcomes for mentors: job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intent, job performance, and career success. The findings indicated that mentors versus non-mentors were more satisfied with their jobs and committed to the organization. Providing career mentoring was most associated with career success, psychosocial mentoring with organizational commitment, and role modeling mentoring with job performance. Turnover intent was not linked significantly with any of the subjective career outcome variables. The findings support mentoring theory in that mentoring is reciprocal and collaborative and not simply beneficial for protégés. Longitudinal research is needed however to determine the degree to which providing mentoring impacts a mentor’s career over time. By alerting prospective mentors to the possible personal benefits of providing career, psychosocial, and role modeling mentoring support for protégés, HRD professionals can improve recruitment efforts for mentoring programs.

Section snippets

Introduction and purpose

Mentoring has long been acclaimed to be a career management and development tool in organizations (Baugh and Sullivan, 2005, O_Reilly, 2001). The list of career benefits accrued from mentoring includes job performance, early career socialization, career advancement, retention of high potential talent, and leader development to name a few (Chao et al., 1992, Ragins and Cotton, 1999, Scandura and Williams, 2004). However, most of extant research on mentoring benefits has focused on the protégés

Who are mentors and what are mentoring functions?

Mentors are typically defined as individuals with advanced experience and knowledge who are committed to providing support for the purpose of increasing career advancement of junior organizational members or their protégés (Kram, 1983, Kram, 1985). Haggard, Dougherty, Turban, and Wilbanks (2011) noted that there are more than 40 different definitions used since 1980 to describe individuals who act as mentors. Most of these definitions share the view that mentors are more senior individuals who

Outcomes associated with mentoring relationships for mentors

Various mentor outcomes have been explored through empirical studies done by the scholars focusing on the mentor's perspective. These outcomes can be classified into two broad categories namely objective career outcomes and subjective career outcomes. Objective career outcomes include compensation and promotion (*Allen et al., 2006, Eby et al., 2006, Gentry and Sosik, 2010). Subjective career outcomes include less tangible and more affective indicators of career success such as job

Literature search

We used several methods to identify studies examining benefits for mentors. First, we conducted a computerized bibliographic search of PsycINFO, ABI/INFORM, and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses by using keywords such as mentor, mentoring benefits, mentor's subjective career success, mentor's job performance, mentor's job satisfaction, mentor's organizational commitment, and mentor's objective career success. We reviewed the reference lists of each article and dissertation we identified through

Results

We stated in Hypothesis 1 that individuals who have mentored will report greater subjective career outcomes than those who have not mentored. Table 1 shows the results for studies comparing three career outcomes (i.e., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intent) for mentors versus non-mentors. The results indicated that mentors were more satisfied with their job (weighted mean r = .123) and more committed to their organization (weighted mean r = .12). For turnover intent, the

Discussion

The purpose of this meta-analytic study was to test the possible associations between provision of mentoring functions (psychosocial, career, role modeling) and subjective career outcomes for mentors, that is, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intent, job performance, and career success. The results of the study add to the emerging literature on mentoring benefits in that it strongly supported the notion that there are career outcome benefits related to being a mentor.

Research implications

While our study provides a quantitative summary of the associations between provision of different kinds of mentoring functions and mentor's subjective career outcomes, a causal link can only be claimed through studies that use longitudinal experimental designs to examine if being a mentor impacts mentor's career over a certain period. The most important challenge would be to control for mentors being already high performers or having higher commitment towards their organizations and greater

Conclusion

In sum, the results of our meta-analysis provide substantial evidence for mentor benefits associated with mentoring. Further, we found interesting differences in associations between the different kinds of mentoring functions and mentor outcomes. Still, given the smaller number of correlations for many of the outcome variables studied, much research needs to be conducted to extend our findings for enhancing both theoretical and practical understanding of the mentor's perspective and needs in

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