Connecting Formal Mentoring Empirical Principles to the Applied World

Onboarding is a process in which new employees develop the knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes to succeed in their new job and within their new organization (Bauer & Erdogan, 2011). Outcomes of successful onboarding include the development of a professional identity, increased job performance, role clarity, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment, and reduced withdrawal intentions (Bauer & Erdogan, 2011). One specific onboarding tactic organizations implement to spread the information of the company to new employees, allowing them to adjust, is through a mentoring program. Research suggests mentored individuals are more satisfied with their career, more likely to believe that they would advance in their career, and more likely to be committed to their career than non-mentored co-workers (Allen, 2004). Furthermore, Allen and colleagues’ (2004) meta-analytic analysis of mentorship programs called for more studies to provide support in creating a robust understanding of workplace mentoring in organizations. Bauer and Erdogan (2011) explained the need for various longitudinal studies to gain a better picture of the socialization process, and Lawler and Hall (1970) highlighted the need for a stronger support between the relationship of job involvement and job characteristics in the onboarding processes. The present study looks to strengthen the current state of literature by conducting a formal mentoring program intervention using a repeated measures within-subject design to clarify the dynamic relationship between empirically supported principles of mentoring and role clarity, job involvement, and job characteristics. Specifically, this study tested the intervention of a formal mentoring program over a thirty-day period with two self-report survey time points for individuals within an organization in the Southeast region of the United States. Overall, this study failed to find significant results, thereby failing to support the hypothesized relationship between a mentoring intervention, and role clarity and job involvement