Effects of the Characteristics of Internal and External Mentors on the Mentoring Functions

The purpose of this research is to determine the characteristics of internal and external mentorship while examining functions of each mentoring relationship. Additional purpose of the study is to find out how trust affects each mentoring functions since trust is one of important factors impacting mentor relationship. This study focuses on the quality of the developmental relationship, rather than the mentee’s work outcomes. Data for this study was collected via questionnaire survey from mentees who work for big enterprises which are the 30 of largest company in Korea. Survey was distributed to 457 members of the firms who have been working for about 2 years to 5, and 300 surveys were used. According to the result of descriptive statistics, men had more internal mentors compared to women (45.6% of men had mentors while 54.4% of women had external mentors, while 73.1% of men had internal mentors, while 26.9% of women had internal mentors). Majority of internal mentor (66.5%) was assigned by officially, while majority of external mentor (78.6%) was made by unofficially. Forty-seven point six percents of the external mentors had experience of mentoring for a number of mentees, which may indicate external mentors have more mentoring experience than internal mentors. In the results of this study, external mentors showed higher effectiveness in role modeling functions as well as psychosocial support functions. Therefore, external mentoring showed more effectiveness in counseling, friendship, mentee’s self confidence in psychosocial support functions. As result, we could see that higher trust level between mentors and mentees resulted in higher career developing functions, role model, and psychosocial functions. The characteristic of the mentor does not appear to affect the career development function and the ‘trust in mentor’ does not appear to have a moderating effect between the characteristic of mentor and the mentorship function while trust in mentors appear to significantly affect the effect characteristic of mentors have on the socio-psychological function and role-modeling function. Lastly, the research was able to find out that the trust between mentors and mentees were effective in mentoring functions and it is vital to examine what can be done to increase the trust as a next step.