Fostering Affective Commitment and Work Engagement Through Mentoring

Past research on mentoring has focused primarily on the benefits that protégées and mentors derive from their mentoring relationships. However, little research has been devoted to revealing the ways in which mentoring can benefit organizations. To address this void, a sample of 124 protégées was used to investigate the relationships between satisfaction with a mentor, affective commitment (AC), and work engagement. Perceived organizational support (POS) was hypothesized as the mediator of the aforementioned relationships. Further, in order to identify the factors contributing to satisfaction with the mentor, this study examined the relationship between satisfaction with the mentor and mentorship type and two protégée characteristics: motivation to learn and proactive personality. The findings suggested that satisfaction with the mentor affected protégée levels of AC and work engagement and that the mechanism underlying these relationships was POS. That is, POS was found to mediate the relationship between satisfaction with the mentor, AC, and work engagement. Surprisingly, mentorship type was not a contributing factor to satisfaction with the mentor. Among the protégée characteristics investigated, motivation to learn was positively related to satisfaction with the mentor whether the mentoring relationship was formal or informal