People who have had mentors throughout their lifetimes are likely to have a more satisfying and more intrinsically valuable career, according to new NC State research.
Joshua Lambert, a sociology Ph.D. student and co-author of the study, said researchers wanted to know more about the impact of informal mentoring on labor market outcomes because of the lack of information currently available about the effects of long term mentoring.
The study found people who had mentoring relationships were more likely to emphasize intrinsic job rewards, such as caring about their quality of work and feeling their jobs are important and making a difference. People with mentor relationships were less likely to care as much about extrinsic job rewards, such as better wages and compensation.
Lambert said a mentor is any non-parental adult figure that takes an interest in someone’s life.
“We come in contact with other folks, and they become quite important and instrumental in our lives,” said Steve McDonald, sociology professor at NC State and lead author of the study.
McDonald said examples of mentors include teachers, clergy members, employers or relatives.
The researchers studied informal mentoring relationships in adolescents, and many of the mentors adolescents had in the study were teachers.
“I think a lot of it has to do with the mentor taking it upon themselves to have an investment in the adolescent’s future,” Lambert said. “That can look many different ways: It can be more emotional support, it can be very instrumental, or it can be more along the lines of role modeling.”
The study followed people who said they had mentors as well as people who didn’t and also used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. Researchers looked at information about these people over time to see what their employment outcomes were like later on, McDonald said.
The study tried to discover whether there was a causal relationship between mentoring relationships and the labor market and also whether or not the impact was long term.
The researchers used the propensity score matching technique to attempt to isolate the impact of informal mentoring on labor markets.
“We line up people that have similar risk factors that are basically the same in terms of their background but differ only in terms of having a mentor or not having a mentor, and we match all these folks up and look at the difference in terms of their outcomes,” McDonald said.
One important benefit of mentoring found by the study was intrinsic job rewards, according to McDonald.
“I think what it suggests is that mentors help young people to try to focus on getting career types of jobs rather than just getting jobs,” McDonald said.
The study treated the definition of mentor subjectively and looked at naturally occurring mentoring relationships.
Just because some mentoring relationships are naturally occurring, such as relationships that come from mentor programs, it doesn’t mean people can’t still emphasize their importance, Lambert said.
“There is something really special about the organic way that mentoring takes place, and one very big challenge of formal mentoring programs is they have to try to recreate that,” Lambert said.
