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Mentoring refers to a developmental relationship between two individuals, normally of unequal status and experience, the mentor and the protégé. In this relationship the mentor provides a variety of career development and socio-emotional support functions for the protégé (e.g. [49] Kram, 1985; and also see [42] Haggard et al. , 2011). Mentoring is part of the individual's social capital ([14] Baruch and Bozionelos, 2010), and has attracted voluminous systematic research from the perspective of the protégé. This research has mainly focused on the career benefits of mentoring, and has established beyond doubt that having been mentored relates to both objective and subjective career success (meta-analyses by [9] Allen et al ., 2004; [35] Eby et al ., 2008). There is also empirical evidence, albeit less extensive, that mentoring relates to work attitudes of protégés, including organizational commitment (e.g. [27] Dawley et al. , 2010; [29] Donaldson et al. , 2000; [64] Payne and Huffman, 2005).
However, despite the abundance of empirical research on mentoring from the perspective of the protégé, the mentor's perspective has been largely neglected so far. The mentoring relationship involves a dyad, the mentor and the protégé, and both members of the dyad contribute to the relationship. Therefore, lack of consideration of the one member of the dyad leaves a substantial gap that needs to be addressed ([5] Allen, 2007; [70] Ramaswami and Dreher, 2007). The limited systematic empirical research that adopted the viewpoint of the mentor has predominantly focused on correlates of intentions to mentor (e.g. [10] Aryee et al. , 1996; [68] Ragins and Scandura, 1999). Though an important factor, intentions are only imperfect precursors of actual behavior (e.g. [1] Ajzen, 2001; [80] Stone et al. , 2009) and, hence, actual mentoring provided needs to be looked at ([5] Allen, 2007). There are only a handful of studies that investigated relationships of the actual act of providing mentoring to others with career outcomes and work attitudes of mentors ([6] Allen et al ., 2006; [16] Bozionelos, 2004; [34] Eby et al. , 2006). The findings of these studies are briefly reviewed below in order to set the stage for the present work.
Both [16] Bozionelos (2004) and [6] Allen et al . (2006) found that mentoring was related to...