The Association of Formal and Informal Public Accounting Mentoring with Role Stress and Related Job Outcomes. Accounting Organizations and Society

This paper examines the association between mentoring (both formal and informal) and three measures of role stress (role conflict, role ambiguity, and perceived environmental uncertainty), as well as two job outcomes (job performance and turnover intentions). The statistical analysis is based on structural equation modeling, using responses from 794 employees of large public accounting organizations. The results suggest that in addition to providing the traditional career development and psychosocial support functions, informal mentors provide protégés with information that clarifies their organizational role (reduces role ambiguity). However, mentoring benefits may come at a cost: higher role conflict. The study found limited positive eects attributed to formally assigned mentors. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek and Rosenthal’s (1964) theory of role dynamics identifies that individuals learn their organizational roles from role expectations communicated to them by mem-bers of their role set (supervisors and co-workers). Mentors, who are more experienced organiza-tional members interested in developing and pro-moting an individual’s career (Hunt & Michael, 1983), are also members of that role set. Thus, by definition, mentors may possess information which, if communicated to the individual, would clarify his/her role (i.e. reduce his/her role ambi-guity). In addition to providing role-clarifying information, mentors may also provide protégés with alternatives for dealing with role demands, including role expectations that may conflict. Kram (1988, p. 71) notes that an important devel-opmental task for junior level employees is ‘‘seeing alternatives and making choices about how to carry out the managerial role’’. Recent studies have shown that the quality of feedback from supervisors and co-workers is associated with lower levels of role ambiguity (Sawyer, 1992). Also, higher quality exchanges between leaders and subordinate-newcomers is associated with lower role ambiguity and moder-ates the negative eects (such as intentions to leave) associated with unmet role expectation