The Development of Informal Mentoring and Its Influence on Employee Early Career

Abstract

Abstract:

Mentoring is defined as a personal relationship between a more experienced senior employee(mentor) and a less experienced junior one(protégé) in which the mentor provides support, direction, and feedback regarding the protégé's career plans and personal development. Using a sample of 174 junior employees in China, we examine the role of proactive personality in the receipt of different forms of early career informal mentoring, the mediating roles of networking and voice behaviors between this relationship, and the differential relationships that different functions of informal mentoring(i.e., psychosocial mentoring, vocational mentoring, protection and guidance) have with subjective and objective career success. Structural equation modeling results indicate that proactive personality is positively related to both psychosocial and vocational mentoring, and that the relationships are mediated by networking and voice behaviors. Vocational mentoring is positively related to both subjective and objective career success. None of the other forms of mentoring is related to career success. At the end, we discuss implications for mentoring theories and research, as well as the management of the Chinese work force. We also provide some promising directions for future researches on mentoring.

Key words: informal mentoring, proactive personality, networking behavior, voice behavior, career success

Xu Jie, Liang Jian. The Development of Informal Mentoring and Its Influence on Employee Early Career[J]. , 2015, 27(11): 96-106.

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