Leader Development Outcomes of Relational Mentoring for Mentors

Mentoring is widely recognized as a beneficial tool to develop new employees or students (i.e., protégés). Though mentors can also benefit from mentoring relationships, this aspect has been largely neglected in the empirical literature. One of the objectives of this dissertation, therefore, was to investigate mentoring outcomes for mentors. In this dissertation, I focused on leader and leadership development as mentor outcomes. The leadership literature has focused mainly on leadership development through formal training programs, rather than through challenging assignments and daily life experiences such as mentoring others. To fill the research gaps, I proposed and investigated leader development outcomes of relational mentoring for mentors. In particular, I hypothesized improvements in mentor- and leader-related identity, self-efficacy, and motivation, as the mentor outcomes. Secondly, in this dissertation, I distinguish between traditional and relational mentoring. Mentoring scholars have studied almost exclusively average-quality, exchange-based mentoring relationships (i.e., traditional mentoring) and have overlooked a full continuum of mentoring quality that includes high-quality relationships (i.e., relational mentoring) as well. Therefore, mentoring research needs to incorporate relational mentoring into its exploration. To test the hypotheses, I conducted three separate studies. First, I conducted two studies with the following objectives: (1) to develop a short-form scale to measure relational mentoring, by reducing the items of the Relational Mentoring Index (RMI; Ragins, 2011) and (2) to examine the validity and reliability of the short-form scale. The results from Study 1 and Study 2 supported the validity and reliability of the short-from scale. Second, to examine the leader development outcomes for mentors, I implemented a mentoring program and recruited its mentors as the participants of the study. I collected the data at four points in time. The results of Study 3 confirmed that mentors who participated in a formal mentoring program gained many mentor and leader development outcomes. Moreover, the provision of traditional and relational mentoring were related to increases in the development outcomes when treated as separate independent variables. However, when entered in the analyses together, the provision of relational mentoring did not explain more variance in the outcomes over and above traditional mentoring. This dissertation contributes to the literature by developing a short-form scale to advance research on relational mentoring, putting the emphasis on mentors (rather than protégés), investigating mentoring beyond the average-quality relationships, and connecting the mentoring and leadership development literatures through investigating leader development outcomes for mentors