Background of the Study
There is one common issue among graduate students and early-career employees, who tend to show lower self-efficacy (Klassen, Krawchuk, & Rajani, 2008). In order to deal with the issue, mentoring has been offered as an effective solution. As a new comer to a company, mentoring becomes a key function. Mentoring has widely been seen as an interpersonal influence process (Allen, Poteet, & Russell, 2000). Mentors help protégés with their psychological growth (Rhodes, 2002), career development (Hunt & Michael, 1983), and performance (Tonidandel, Avery, & Phillips, 2007).
Self-efficacy is a factor which will influence individual outcomes (Bandura, 1982), for example, as an early-career employee, they will doubt if they have necessary ability to complete the tasks successfully. This is a common situation to organizational new comers, especially for those who just graduated from school and early-career employees, even if they had good education experience before they start working. Education is a way to teach knowledge to students, including professional knowledge, skill and abilities for working, but it does not guarantee self-efficacy when students first enter an organization. Managers should organize strategy for helping employee increase their outcomes, which will affect organization performance. Mentoring is a good method which has been used in operation for years. There are many researches which investigate mentor as their key variable. The significant role of mentoring for employee’s life has drawn an increasing attention from researchers since Kram and Isabella (1985) announced the theory. However, even if mentoring has been recognized as a method for enhanced career development, lots of organizations did not make formal plans for operation (Kram & Isabella, 1985).
According to Scandura and Ragins (1993), mentoring has three dimensions, including psychosocial support, career development, and role modeling. These three factors might
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have different effect on protégés. Therefore, this research will try to find out if mentoring functions will influence protégés in different ways. By analyzing mentoring functions, the result can provide appropriate direction for organizations to develop the mentoring program which fits the organizational needs.
Mentoring function has been proved as an important factor associated with the in-role performance in the organization (Liu, Liu, Kwan, & Mao, 2009). By contrast, less researchers had focused on the relationship between mentoring function and extra-role performance, such as helping and voice behavior. In addition, extra-role behavior has been proved to have positive effect on organizational effectiveness (Podsakoff, Ahearne, &
MacKenzie 1997), it becomes a popular issue for enterprises and managers. Managers try to motivate the employee to do the extra role behavior in order to enhance organizational performance. However, Kram and Isabella’s study (1985) has mentioned that mentors are strongly related to protégés’ behavior, hence, this research aims to examine these two variables.
Statement of the Problem
Self-efficacy has been proved to have a positive relationship with work-related performance. However, work-related performance has a broad definition. In previous studies, little attention has been paid on the in-role and extra role performance on early-career employees. Although self-efficacy has already been proved to have an indirect influence to extra role performance (Salanova, Lorente, Chambel, & Martínez, 2011), still little research has investigated the direct relationship between them.
Mentoring has always been a popular concept in research since Kram and Isabella (1985) announced it. After that Scandura and Ragins (1993) claimed the act of mentoring includes several functions, which also indicate different mentorship roles. Although plenty of previous researches have examined the relationship between mentoring function and performance, they took women (Ragins & Scandura, 1999), students (June, Potter,
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Simpson, & Edwards, 2000), coaches (Tonidandel et al., 2007) as samples, and paid less attention on early-career employee (Whitely, Dougherty, & Dreher, 1991).
An understanding of the relationship between mentoring function and performance is very crucial for an organization. A major limitation existed in the past mentoring research, that is, most studies focused on middle-level to senior-level managers but often made recommendations for managers of mentoring at the beginning of their careers (Roche, 1979). Therefore, this study focuses specifically on early-career employees. This study proposes that organization can impact early-career employee’s performance through mentoring functions.
Purpose of Study
Based on the preceding discussions, there are some objectives of this study. Firstly, this study focuses on the early-career employees, who seem to have lower self-efficacy (Klassen et al., 2008), in order to understand mentoring’s influence on performance.
Second, this study distinguishes performance into two dimensions, in-role performance and extra-role performance. By analyzing the collected data, this study hopes to examine the relationship of self-efficacy on different types of performance. Third, this research applies Scandura’s (1992) theory, and separates mentoring function into three factors. This study investigates the moderation effect of mentoring function on the relationship between self-efficacy and performance. Furthermore, this study explores the effectiveness of different mentoring functions. The result of this study may provide some evidence and suggestions for future researchers who want to probe into the early-career employees’ performance.
Questions
This research seeks to examine the following questions:
1. What is the relationship between self-efficacy and in-role performance for early-career employee?
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2. What is the relationship between self-efficacy and extra role performance for early-career employee?
3. Does mentoring function have a significant moderating effect between self-efficacy and in role performance?
4. Does mentoring function have a significant moderating effect between self-efficacy and extra role performance?
Significance of Study
Based on the literature review, none of the research has focused on the relationship of mentoring function and protégé’s professional performance. In addition, this study emphasizes a particular sample, early-career employees. Early-career employees as a research sample has seldom been tested in the organizational field. Therefore, this study not only contribute to academic field, but also organizational domain. By connecting the concept of self-efficacy and individual’s performance, it might create a new way for organizations or managers to enhance newcomers’ in-role performance and the intention of helping others. This research may provide new directions for future researches in the academic field, moreover, it can help managers to better program the mentoring function to employees.
For academic, it is a new direction for study in self-efficacy and mentoring function.
According to previous studies, there are few researches that pay attention to early-career employees, especially in connecting these two variables. Through this study, it will verify the importance of mentoring to the employees.
In terms of practical application, nowadays, organizations try to employ those who just graduated to join their company for several reasons. Firstly, early-career employees are cheaper than senior employees. From the company’s perspective, lower pay implies lower cost. Secondly, early-career employees are more flexible than seniors. Senior employees have lots of working experience and know-how of working process. This is
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their advantage and also disadvantage at the same time. Sometimes, they would like to insist on their own knowledge rather than listen to others’ suggestions. By contrast, early-career employees are more willing to participate in training program and willing to learn.
For these reasons, early-career employee become more important workforce recently.
Managers should prepare better training programs in order to retain talents. Supervisors could refer to this study for developing strategy to improve early-career employee’s performance. Organizations can also benefit from assigning the most suitable function of mentor to help protégés.
For HR professionals, the finding and conclusion in this result would provide useful guide for designing training program for early-career newcomers, if the organizational culture encourage organizational citizenship behavior, the result might give some suggestion for how to improve employee’s extra role performance. In addition, self-efficacy self-report might be a predictor of individual’s performance. The result may help HR appropriately assign a mentor for the employee.
Scope of Study
This study targeted only the early-career employees, who has worked for five years or below, in various industries. Furthermore, it only investigated the sample who has a working mentor in the past 6 months. In addition, the study focuses on the relationship among self-efficacy, dimensions of mentoring function, in-role performance, helping and voice, according to the model constructed in this research.
Definition of Terms Self-efficacy
It refers to one’s belief in his/her ability or skill can accomplish the task or succeed in specific condition and difficult and the belief that future actions will be successful (Bandura, 1977, 1986, 1997). This study adopts Bandura’s definition, study early-career employee’s confidence on their own professional ability which can solve problem smoothly.
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Mentoring Function
It is defined as an interpersonal exchange in the workplace between a junior and a senior employee, in which the senior employee (mentor) supports, guides, and orients the junior employee (protégé) to the various tasks, functions, and culture within the organization (Kram, 1983). It includes three dimensions, career development, psychosocial support, and role modeling.
Psychosocial Support
It is defined as reflecting the friendship function of mentoring (Kram & Isabella, 1985). Friendship function refers to the interaction of mentor and protégés. For example, protégé will exchange confidence, share their feeling and have meals with mentor. This research adapts Kram and Isabella’s definition, defines psychosocial support as the mutual affection relationship between mentor and protégé, which provide interpersonal support.
Career Development
It is defined as tap the one-on-one career coaching function performed by mentors (Scandura & Ragins, 1993), such as, mentor will interest in protégés’ personal career and assign specific task to them. This study adapts Scandura and Ragins’s definition, measure the protégés’ feeling of coaching from their mentor.
Role Modeling
It is defined as reflected the protégé’s modeling of the mentor’s effective work behaviors (Scandura & Ragins, 1993). Mentor as the one who has special relationship with the protégé, especially in work-related field. Mentors give the suggestion and help protégés to get familiar with organizational culture. As a result, protégés will imitate the behaviors of the mentor. This study adopts Scandura and Ragins’s definition, to examine if protégés’
behavior will be affected by mentors.
In-role Performance
In-role behavior is required or expected behavior and is the basis of regular and
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ongoing job performance (Katz, 1964). It is defined as the behaviors which are recognized by formal organization systems and as described in job descriptions (Williams & Anderson, 1991). Adopting Williams and Anderson definition, this research investigates employee’s formal individual behavior and self-reported performance. For example, if protégés can accomplish the task which was assigned by the company.
Helping
Helping is defined as promotive behavior which emphasizes cooperative and the acts of consideration (Van Dyne & LePine, 1998). Helping is a behavior which directly affiliative and also emphasizes the interpersonal harmony. It helps building and maintaining the relationship with others.
Voice
Voice is a behavior of making suggestions or recommending organizational change and modification. Even when others oppose the opinion. Van Dyne and LePine (1998, p.109) defined it as “a promotive behavior which emphasizes expression of constructive challenge intended to improve rather than merely criticize”.
Early-career Employees
Early-career employees are not defined by the age. Different from the new comers, it is more focus on the employees’ working year. This group includes workers whose working experience is less than five years. The working experience comprises part-time job and internship experience.
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