مرکز نظارت و بازده و تعهد موثر کارکنان: نقش مهمی از عوامل محیطی  Supervisory mentoring and employee affective commitment and turnover: The critical role of contextual factors

Supervisory Mentoring in Context According to Viator and Scandura (1991), mentors provide three functions to protégés: vocational mentoring, role modeling, and social support. Vocational mentoring focuses on preparing the protégé for career advancement, role modeling on conveying appropriate attitudes, values and behaviors, and social support on providing positive regard and tangible help. In the case of supervisory mentoring, mentoring functions are performed on the sidelines of usual supervisory duties (Tepper, 1995) and involve a deeper, more personal supervisor-subordinate relationship (Booth, 1996; Eby et al., 2015; Pan, Sun, & Chow, 2011). Supervisory mentors also have substantial leverage to perform mentoring functions through daily interactions with subordinates and direct control over work assignments (Eby et al., 2015; Raabe & Beehr, 2003; Scandura & Williams, 2004). Of critical importance, supervisors personify the organization and through exposure to supervisors’ mentoring behaviors employees likely form perceptions about the extent to which the organization values them and their development (Eisenberger et al., 2002; Wanberg et al., 2003). On the basis of social exchange theory (Blau, 1964), employees are therefore expected to reciprocate to the organization the benefits associated with supervisory mentoring. Supporting this idea, supervisory mentoring was found to be positively related to affective commitment (e.g., Scandura & Williams, 2004), which captures employees’ emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization (Meyer & Allen, 1991). Likewise, Payne and Huffman (2005) found that affective commitment partially mediated the relationship of formal mentoring to turnover and this relationship to be stronger when the supervisor was identified as the mentor, suggesting that supervisory mentoring indirectly contributes to retain employees. These results justify viewing affective commitment as fully mediating the relationship of supervisory mentoring to turnover. Yet critical features of the organizational context such as job design, human resource policies, including performance management systems and reward systems, or organizational culture plausibly influence supervisory mentoring’s effects (Chandler et al., 2011; Kram, 1985). As mentoring aims to support employee development, characteristics of the context serving this purpose should be particularly influential. Building on the substitutes for leadership literature (Howell et al., 1986; see also Kerr & Jermier, 1978), contextual factors reflecting the organization’s support for employee development should act as “enhancers” of supervisory mentoring by creating an impetus for the social exchange relationship between employees and supervisors. Indeed, growth and development are sought for by a large number of employees. As a matter of fact, employees today expect organizations to involve them in decision-making, provide challenging and meaningful work, support skill development and offer career management assistance, among others (Roehling, Cavanaugh, Moynihan, & Boswell, 2000). The popularity of the notions of “boundaryless career” and “protean career” (Baruch, 2006) further illustrates that employees often consider organizational membership as a vehicle through which they can attain valued personal goals. Of particular importance, highly qualified white collar employees are known to highly value continuous development (Drucker, 1999) and to expect their needs and wishes to be considered by the organization (Benson et al., 2004; Ng, 2016). In this study, we focus on two contextual factors indicative of the organization’s concern for employee development: (a) job scope, and (b) career and development opportunities. Both job scope and career and development opportunities are central to highly qualified white collar jobs (Allen, Bryant, & Vardaman, 2010; Drucker, 1999; Parker, 2014). In addition, both factors can be shaped by organizations (Hackman & Oldham, 1980; Kraimer, Seibert, Wayne, Liden, & Bravo, 2011), suggesting that they can concretely be leveraged to maximize mentoring’s benefits.