The relationship of career mentoring to early career outcomes

of Management Journal 34: 331-351.

Zey, M.

1984 The mentor connection. Homewood, Ill.: Dow Jones-Irwin.

Introduction

Studies of the early career progress of managers and non-managerial professionals have been frequently based on the principle that career progress in organizations is determined by ability, achievement, and contribution to the organization (Howard and Bray 1988: 54-80). However, researchers have also recognized that managers' and professionals' career mobility and financial rewards are often, at least partly, allocated on the basis of informal interpersonal processes (Coates and Pellegrin 1957; Pfeffer 1977). This article presents findings from a study which examines mentoring as a determinant of the early career outcomes of managers and professionals who are graduates of three Belgian management schools. Our purpose is to draw attention to the fact that measures of early career progress and well-being, such as current income, rate of advancement, and general satisfaction, may be related to interpersonal processes such as mentoring. An examination of these relationships provides insight into one largely informal interpersonal process by which people in the early part of their careers are sorted out for rewards offered by their employers. These employers allocate important rewards based on many criteria. To the extent that mentoring influences this allocation process, informal mechanisms are identified which affect managers' and professionals' early career progress and well-being in organizations. Since our focus is on the early career consequences of mentoring, it is not our purpose here to explore the many questions concerned with the mentoring process, such as how one is chosen (or chooses) to be mentored.

With the exception of single organization studies of early managerial potential (e.g. Bray et al. 1974), previous studies of this early career period provide only limited evidence regarding the nature of career processes (Dreher et al. 1985; Harrell 1969; Pfeffer 1977; Weinstein and Srinivasan 1974). The exception to this observation is the study conducted by Whitely et al. (1991). These authors surveyed a large sample of early career business school undergraduates and MBA alumni from three major colleges of business in the U.S. who had been working from 3-5 years following graduation. After controlling for several alternative sources of explanation, they found that mentoring made a significant contribution to the prediction of early career progress. However, the contribution of mentoring to early promotion history only occurred for young managers and professionals who came from higher socio-economic origins.

Two particular research needs stand out as requiring additional investigation in studies of early career outcomes. First, research has typically used salary as the measure of early career outcomes. We know little about other measures of career outcomes, such as rates of advancement or general satisfaction, and the joint effects of career, personal satisfaction, situational and interpersonal influences on these outcomes. Investigation of additional measures of early career outcomes is important in order to develop a more general understanding of this early career period of professionals and managers. The range of dependent variables studied must be expanded to include additional career processes, especially since the determinants of early career outcomes may differ. We include in our study both a measure of income and a measure of the number of promotions, as criteria of early career progress. We also include measures of general work and career satisfaction as indicators of personal well-being during this career period.

Second, additional typically informal interpersonal influences on early career outcomes need investigation. One widely recognized informal interpersonal influence process is mentoring (Kram 1985). While mentoring has been recognized as an important process for fostering career development and progress, it has not received much systematic attention in research on the careers of managers and professionals (Kram 1985; Zey 1984). In particular, not enough attention has been directed to the effects of mentoring on early career outcomes; the focus has mainly been on the process of mentoring. In this study we explicitly examine the relationship between career mentoring and early career outcomes. Another limitation of most prior mentoring research is its tendency to use a retrospective procedure by including samples of middle level to senior managers. These later career samples are asked to recall prior mentoring experiences. The studies often make recommendations regarding the importance of mentoring for managers and professionals who are at the beginning of their careers (Levinson et al. 1978; Roche 1979). Apart from the post hoc fallacy created by such a retrospective procedure, it may seriously inflate population parameters of the average amount of mentoring received by early career individuals. This retrospective procedure may also seriously under-estimate parameters of the variability of mentoring received by young managers and professionals, and thus upwardly bias the relationship between mentoring and early career progress or well-being. This retrospective procedure may also confound the career outcomes related to social class and career mentoring since higher level managers tend to have higher social class origins (Granick 1962; Poole et al. 1981).