Based on the data analysis, this chapter presents the conclusions, research implications, practical implications, research limitations, and suggestions for future research.
Conclusions
The main purpose of this study is to investigate the moderating effect of different dimensions of mentoring between self-efficacy and performance, which included in-role performance, helping behavior and voice behavior. With the sample of early-career employees whose tenure is below 5 years and with a working mentor in the past 6 months. This study collected data from 395 respondents from several industries through an online questionnaire.
The study conducted extensive reliability and validity assessment to ensure accuracy of the measurement. From data analysis, it illustrated that self-efficacy has a strong effect on individual’s performance. This finding supports the theoretical foundation of Bandura (1977). Moreover, the study found the proposed moderators have stronger direct impacts, rather than moderating effects, on the dependent variables, which supported Scandura and Ragins’s research in 1993, who mentioned about the direct effect of mentoring and protégés outcome. After analyzing the data, career development as a key mentoring function for raising protégés’ individual performance, has a positive effect on both in-role and extra role performance. Role modeling shows positive influence on in-role performance and helping, while psychosocial support shows a positive impact on voice behavior. In conclusion, mentoring has significant effect on protégés no matter which function is provided.
By testing the moderating effect, this result proves that role modeling mentoring function weakens the positive relationship between self-efficacy and in-role
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performance. It does not help the employees with high efficacy, but helps low self-efficacy employees to improve their in-role performance. However, the other moderators have not been found the moderating effect. Additionally, the interaction terms’ low R square value in the overall regression model suggests that there may be other important factors which may moderate the relationship between self-efficacy and performance. Furthermore, the statistical analysis presents that gender has significant negative effect on in-role performance and helping behavior. It could be said that female employees have better in-role performance and have better cooperative concept in the workplace.
Discussion
Nowadays, organizations start to pay attention on the early-career employees. For example, lots of company will go to the job fair held by universities. Early-career employees are important working force for the society. Early-career employees are a group of people who just graduated from school with less experience and lower self-efficacy. The study proposes a suggestion for organizations to design the mentoring program to improve early-career employees’ performance.
This study provides the evidence that companies should pay attention on the mentoring program which will have direct effect on protégés’ performance, especially for early-career employees who rely on mentor to get involved in organization.
Mentoring provides essential and psychological support, which requires time and professional experience during the process. The process involves transferring mentor’s personal professional experience to protégés, socializing with protégées and serving as a role model to protégés. According to the result of this research, especially for those low self-efficacy employees, the role modeling will enhance their in-role performance.
Therefore, the mentoring program should be well planned in assigning a suitable person as a mentor.
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Imitating as a behavior not only happens during young age, previous research showed that adults continued to copy others’ behavior, adopting with higher level than the children (McGuigan, Makinson, & Whiten, 2011). This provides a similar concept of role modeling. Imitating mentor’s behavior which could strengthen in-role performance may be a way to compensate low self-efficacy. Consequently, it is necessary for companies to provide a mentor relationship to employees.
The research questions are answered as follows. First, self-efficacy shows a strong positive effect with both in-role and extra role performance. It supported the literature by Stajkovic and Luthans (1998), which claimed self-efficacy and work-related performance had significant correlation. Furthermore, this study proved that high self-efficacy employees are more willing to do the helping and voice behavior. Second, different mentoring functions show direct effect on different aspects of protégé’s performance. However, only role-modeling shows the moderating effect on in-role performance.
Research Implications
Summarizing the literature review, Scandura (1992) is a key researcher in mentoring concept. He distinguished mentoring function into three dimensions, including career development, psychosocial support and role modeling. However, little research had investigated the difference of influence between the three of them. This research provides valuable empirical evidence which clarified the differential impact of mentoring functions on individual’s performance, as well as on the relationship between self-efficacy and individual’s performance. Moreover, this research contributed to the discussion of a common topic, self-efficacy, but in a specific population, the early-career employees. The result of this research represents a substantial outcome about the moderating effect of mentoring on early-career employees. The result shows that role modeling mentoring function could be used when protégés are low in self-efficacy in
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order to raise their in-role performance.
Although the result did not find career development and psychosocial support as a moderator between self-efficacy and protégés’ performance, the outcome still contributes to mentoring functions. The result shows that when a mentor wants to enhance the protégés’ performance, providing career development function would be the best way. It could raise their in-role performance and also raise the motivation for helping and voice behavior. About raising the protégés’ motivation of helping behavior, role modeling would also be a good method. When it goes to the voice behavior, to prevent the employee silence, the result suggests mentors to use psychosocial support for encouraging the protégés to speak their opinion.
Moreover, this research found that gender has a strong effect on in-role performance and helping behavior. According to the outcome, it shows that female have better in-role performance and helping than male. However, gender differences in performance were not found in the literature for the sample of early career employees.
Also, this study found that females are more likely to help others at the workplace than males, which supported previous studies (Lerner & Frank, 1974).
Practical Implications
The finding of this research provides some useful outcome for the organizations.
First, it provides an understanding of self-efficacy on early-career employees.
Nowadays, organizations are willing to recruit early-career employees who are enthusiastic and has potential for training. From the result, it shows that mentoring program have direct effect on early-career employees’ performance. From organization’s perspective, this study confirmed the benefit of mentoring with early-career employees. When company needs to recruit early-early-career employees, prepare a mentoring program would be a method for improving their performance.
Second, different function of mentoring would have different effect on protégés.
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Provide career development and role modeling would enhance the in-role performance of protégés. In addition, in order to encourage employees to present their suggestions, mentors are suggested to use career development and psychosocial support. Having lunch with protégés and socialize with them will enhance the willingness of voice behavior. As a result, the mentor should provide different mentoring function by condition.
Last, as a company, the new recruits may include high and low self-efficacy employees. For those employees with low self-efficacy, they would have lower in-role performance than those with higher self-efficacy. In this situation, mentors play a key role which could help employees to promote the in-role performance. Role modeling provides a solution for this situation.
Research Limitations
Firstly, this research adopted the data collection method which was self-reported, and collected the data though the internet. It means that it cannot avoid some interference factors when the respondents filled out the survey. Furthermore, this study translated the measurement into Chinese. Hence, during the process, it might produce biases which will influence the meaning and respondents’ interpretation of the items, even though this research utilized back translation method to ensure accuracy of translating the measurements.
Next, this study aims to investigate the moderating effect of mentoring functions between self-efficacy and performance. However, this research did not find moderating effect of career development and psychosocial support functions. One possible reason is the strong linkage between self-efficacy and performance, which decreases the power of mentoring’s moderating effect.
Future Research Suggestions
This research provides a good insight into different dimensions of mentor’s
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influence. For future researches, they could extend this concept by examining the different application, such as other segments of population and variables. Other independent variables, instead of self-efficacy, can serve as the predictor of performance, such as task complexity, to further examine the moderating effect of mentoring.
Mentoring has been distinguished into two type, formal and informal, the difference is about if the mentor is assigned by the organization. Furthermore, some organizations will arrange the schedule for formal mentoring, to ensure the mentoring process is on the right track. However, because of the difficulty in sampling, this study was not able to clarify the difference between these two kinds of mentoring. For future research, it may be a direction which can be investigated for getting more accurate result.
Result of this research discovers that gender affects in-role performance and helping behavior. Moreover, the first job experience has positive effect on voice behavior as well. These findings may contribute to future research in explicating how other demographic factors may contribute to individual performance with mentoring as a direct or moderating effect.
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