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ABSTRACT
Mentors have been associated with protégé career success. In this study, two perspectives on the means by which mentoring advances careers were compared. The performance perspective implies that the effects of mentoring on career advancement operate through performance whereas the political perspective assumes direct effects. Hypotheses derived from the perspectives were tested at early and middle-career stages in a sample of American academics. The amount of mentoring as measured by the number of traditional mentors and other developers predicted achieved rank and the relationship was not mediated by publication productivity. This finding supports the political perspective. In addition, the presence of an outside developer was associated with more publications and having an emotionally-close relationship was associated with higher salary.
KEYWORDS
academic careers * career advancement * developmental relationships * mentors * organizational politics
Introduction
The mentor/protégé relationship has received much attention lately. Mentors typically are described as senior members of organizations who commit to facilitating protégés' careers. Most proclaimed is the association of mentors with protégé success, as measured by promotion rates (Dreher & Ash, 1990; Fagenson, 1989; Koberg et al., 1994; Wallace, 2001) and income levels (Chao, 1997; Dreher & Ash, 1990; Kirchmeyer, 1998; Wallace, 2001). Mentoring functions also can be performed by developers other than senior members of the same organization, such as experienced co-workers and outsider associates (Higgins & Thomas, 2001; Raabe & Beehr, 2003). Hence, examining constellations of developers who perform mentoring functions may be more informative than examining only traditional mentors (Higgins & Kram, 2001).
To call mentoring 'fashionable' may not be an exaggeration. From a count in the social science and education databases, Colley (2001) found the literature on mentoring increased exponentially over the last 20 years exceeding 1500 articles. Surveys show that managers believe strongly in the organizational benefits of mentoring (Singh et al., 2002), and mentoring programs have grown in popularity and are considered to be attractive employment features (de Janasz & Sullivan, 2004). Employers encourage mentoring in anticipation of attitudinal, performance, recruitment, and retention gains, and formal programs with dedicated coordinators, mentor/protégé matching, and participant orientations (Gaskill, 1993; Hall & Sandier, 1983; Raabe & Beehr, 2003) compete with other programs for organizational resources. Some business consultants promote mentoring as a cost-effective way to develop...