Does Mentorship among Social Workers Make a Difference? An Empirical Investigation of Career Outcomes

For more than a decade there has been "much ado about mentors" (Roche, 1979, p. 20) in both the popular media and the professional literature. Studies from the fields of business and education and organizational and developmental psychology currently predominate in the scholarly literature on mentorship (for example, Kanter, 1977; Kram, 1985; Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, & McKee, 1978; Phillips-Jones, 1982). In contrast, little information exists about mentor relationships among social workers. What is known is largely from anecdotal or conceptual accounts (for example, Berger, 1990; Faver, Fox, & Shannon, 1983; Richey, Gambrill, & Blythe, 1988; Taibbi, 1983) and a few empirical investigations (for example, Ezell & Odewahn, 1980; York, Henley, & Gamble, 1988). Nonetheless, there has been remarkable consistency across the literature in reporting that mentor relationships are facilitative of--if not essential to--the career development of both men and women. Given the diversity in the literature, it is not surprising that there has been a plethora of definitions of mentorship (Merriam, 1983; Speizer, 1981). For this study, mentorship is conceptualized as an interpersonal helping relationship between two individuals who are at different stages in their professional development. The mentor--the more professionally advanced of the two--facilitates the development and advancement of the protege--the junior professional--by serving as a source of social support beyond what is required solely on the basis of their formal role relationship. Because of the attention it has garnered in recent years, mentorship has become common enough that most professionals have little trouble relating to the term and reporting on their own mentorship experiences or, in some cases, recognizing that they have not experienced such relationships. The following are typical comments regarding mentorship experiences volunteered by social work professionals who participated in the pretest phase of the study: My mentor was my work supervisor. He encouraged me to have high expectations for myself and provided me with administrative opportunities and committee assignments that were beyond my job duties--then made sure I got credit for my work. My mentor was my field liaison when I first met her. She really took the time to get to know me. She has very high standards, and I know that I've learned to handle myself better by watching how she handled things. I was a mentor for a social worker who first began at the agency as a social services aide. With my encouragement she got up the nerve to go back to school and eventually got her MSW [master of social work degree]. I became a mentor for an exceptional student who did his field practicum here. On my recommendation he was hired after graduation. We have since presented at conferences together, and I have introduced him around to the who's who of the profession. Such anecdotal accounts as these, which abound in the qualitative literature on mentorship, provide rich evidence for the importance of mentor relationships. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence that more directly addresses whether mentorship has a differential impact on career outcomes. This study explores whether the careers of social workers who have been involved in mentor relationships are measurably different from the careers of those who have not been involved. The study's approach is noteworthy. First, although most mentorship studies have presumed that mentor relationships facilitate professional careers, this premise has remained largely untested up to this point. Second, the study goes beyond the scope of previous studies by exploring the relationship between mentorship and three career outcome measures: (1) career success, (2) career satisfaction, and (3) income level. Third, the study does not limit itself to just the protege experience; instead, it also investigates the mentor experience, specifically the difference between the career outcomes of those who have been both a mentor and a protege, a mentor but not a protege, a protege but not a mentor, and neither a mentor nor a protege. …