5-1 Summary
The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between mentor’s job insecurity and protégés’ job insecurity; and the role that mentoring support plays in the above relationship. The relationships among the above variables are proposed and supported. Through the findings in this study, we found out that, as predicted, the mentor has a significant influence on protégé’s perceived job insecurity.
Secondly, this study found out that mentoring functions play an important role in lowering mentors’ job insecurity and it showed that mentors with low job insecurity are more willing to provide more support for their protégés. In terms of mentoring function’s mediating effect between mentor and protégé’s job insecurity, the outcome was supported. It significantly lessened the impact of protégés’ job insecurity impact passed on by their mentors.
5-2 Theoretical Implications
Although previous research has shown that mentoring relationship can contribute to the protégé's personal growth and professional development (Hunt & Michael, 1983; Kram, 1985a), the role of mentoring support in protégé’s well-being has been rarely examined. One of the few studies that examined the role of mentoring support and protégé stress found a negative relationship between the two variables (Sosik &
Godshalk, 2000), but this study found that mentoring support alleviate the job insecurity perceptions of protégés.
5-3 Managerial Implications
Based on the research results, this research would like to suggest companies to set up mentorship system within organizations for practical implications. This study showed that mentoring functions are beneficial to both mentors and protégés on reducing the effect of job insecurity. The mentorships in this study are mostly formal, therefore, by providing a mentorship system, the employees are able to feel more comfortable and stable working condition, which will result higher productivity and better performances. In addition, employees who experience job insecurity may not be a suitable mentor because they can pass on the negative attitude and are unable or unwilling to provide decent mentoring support to their protégés, which would
minimize the benefit of mentoring program. On other hand, companies may consider to provide assistance for insecure mentors to allow them keep contributing in the organization.
5-4 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research
Several limitations and future research directions should be noticed:1. Conduct research on participants both with and without mentorship
This study focused on the effect of mentoring functions on the job insecurity perceived by mentors and protégés, but there is no comparison with the people who are not in mentorship. Therefore, I suggest that future study can investigate on the comparison of participants’ perceived job insecurity before and after applying mentoring functions.
2. Focus on specific industry
The samples are gathered from various industries and this might result in bias derived from certain characteristics of industries, if they compose major proportion of the samples. For instance, the turnover rate in finance industry is usually high and employees are not intended to stay in the same company for a long time, which means high job insecurity may not be a significant factor in such industry.
3. Limited amount of research samples
This study was conducted using paired sample of mentors and protégés, and it was not an easy task to collect them. The samples were mostly collected from friends, relatives and colleagues, which making the sample size limited and insufficient.
4. Limited time for data collection
The data was collected in short period of time (1 month), future research can consider using longer time to collect and investigate the influence in the long run.
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Appendix
第二部分、個人工作感受
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第二部分、師徒關係感受
4 您的工作總年資是 ______ 年______月。
5 您在目前這家公司的年資是 ______ 年 ______ 月。
6 您的工作性質是 □ 1)生產 □ 2)業務（含銷售、行銷企劃）
□ 3)工程（含研究開發、品管）□ 4)管理（含人事、資訊、財務）
□ 5)後勤（含物料、採購、進出口、出貨） □ 6)其他__________
7 您的職務是 □ 1)現場人員 □ 2)一般職員 □ 3)基層主管 □ 4)中級主管 □ 5)高 級主管
8 您目前所服務的公司產業別是 □ 1)資訊與通訊傳播業 □ 2)金融與保險業 □ 3)不動產業 □ 4)服務業 □ 5)住宿與餐飲業 □ 6)運輸及倉儲業 □ 7)一般製造業 □ 8)營造業 □ 9)高科技電子業 □ 10)其他_______
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