Untangling Protégé Self-Reports of Mentoring Functions

Abstract

In the current study, we sought to further our understanding of the relations between various types of protégé-reported mentoring functions (psychosocial and career support and role modeling [RM]) by conducting a meta-analysis. We examined the relationships among these functions and investigated their relationships with expected mentorship outcomes. There is still a great deal left for us to understand regarding how these functions relate to outcomes and what these relationships mean. We expanded upon previous meta-analyses in the following ways: We included RM functions in addition to psychosocial and career support functions, corrected for unreliability of the function scales in addition to sampling error, and examined the relations of these functions with one another. Results show that all the mentoring functions were related to outcomes, with RM being the strongest predictor. Finally, we identified and conceptually analyzed numerous moderators of these relations.