A study of mentor-protege personality fit

Abstract

Mentoring was a process by which a mentor, who usually was a more senior person, provided supports to a protégé, who usually was a less senior person. Mentor provided protégé with eleven mentoring tasks, which could be categorized into three kinds of mentoring functions- (1) career related, (2) role model, and (3) psychosocial supports. Mentoring could be described, by the nature of relationship initiation, as informal and formal mentoring. While informal mentoring occurred spontaneously, formal mentoring needed a facilitator to match mentor-protégé pair and to encourage the relationship. The thesis studied the effect of personality fit on subjective success of mentoring. This study employed Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) as an instrument to measure, and to compare the similarity of personality. The study asked respondents to report the level of mentoring functions that both counterparts of pairings provided and received as well as individual's evaluation of success of mentorship. By using Lisrel program, the study found that personality fit had a positive relationship with success of mentorship at a total regression coefficience of .31. This relationship was fully mediated by mentoring functions. The more similar personality was, the higher level of mentoring functions was exchanged. Then, level of mentoring function translated to success of mentorship. A competing model was proposed by using self-assessment of personality instead of MBTI. The competing model compared perceived similarity of ideal and actual counterpart's personalities. Competing model derived at a similar mechanism as comparable altered main model, but it had less total regression coefficience (b = -.33) comparing to altered main model. (b = -.43)