Public Management Mentoring: What Affects Outcomes?

Abstract

Few research studies focus on public managers' mentoring, and few mentoring studies include any outcome measure other than reported satisfaction. Our study examines diverse outcomes for a broad-based set of public managers, including not only satisfaction but also the number of employees supervised in the current job, whether the most recent job was a promotion, and whether the protégé is now a mentor. We argue that these may be particularly important outcomes in the public sector due to the common basis of promotion in numbers supervised and due to the special need to develop protégés into mentors. Our findings show that mentoring outcomes are predicted by attributes of the protégé, the mentor, and the mentoring relationship and by the degree and type of social capital focus of the mentoring.