Examining Mentor Enactment Theory from the Mentor's Perspective: Creating Cost and Benefit Scales to Predict Maintenance Usage

Abstract

In order to advance theory concerning the mentor's perspective as well as theory concerning how communication is used to maintain mentoring relationships, this research created relationship-focused scales to measure the costs and benefits that mentors associate with entering into and maintaining a mentoring relationship. It also tested a proposition in Kalbfleisch's (2002) Mentoring Enactment Theory. First, the literature was reviewed in an attempt to learn what past researchers have uncovered about the costs and benefits of mentoring. Relying on the literature, scales were created that included theoretically-based cost and benefit items. These items were structured so that mentors would respond about their interactions with a specific protégé. In the first phase of this investigation, student-mentors at a Midwestern university were given the cost and benefit scales as well as a scale designed to measure the relational maintenance strategies they used to maintain their mentoring relationships. From this data, the scales were refined and presented to a working adult sample. This second phase of study further refined the scales. A final stage of this study used the data collected in the first two phases to test a proposition in Kalbfleisch's (2002) Mentoring Enactment Theory. Results supported Kalbfleisch's hypothesis that higher levels of mentor investment predicted higher levels of maintenance strategy usage. Exploratory analyses were also conducted to provide a more nuanced understanding of which cost and benefit factors could be used to predict individual maintenance strategies.