Matching for High Quality Mentoring Relationships: Do Values Matter?

Abstract

Formal mentoring programs have become a common human resource practice in organizations and academia to facilitate personal learning and development. However, formal mentoring relationships fall short of their informal counterparts, as they are seldom of exceptional high quality. Mentoring research emphasized the importance of deep-level matching criteria to increase relationship quality and mentoring support by creating the right chemistry between mentor and protégé. Drawing on the formal mentoring framework and the similarity-attraction paradigm, the present study examines the influence of actual value congruence on protégé perceived relationship quality and role modeling support. Moreover, specific relational processes through which high quality relationships are established, as well as proximal outcomes of these relationships, are investigated. We tested the proposed model in a longitudinal study using polynomial regression analyses with data obtained from a sample of 149 mentor-protégé dyads. Results mainly supported the proposed theoretical model. However, the impact of actual fit in values varied depending on the value dimension, revealing self-enhancement and self-transcendence values as the key dimensions. The implications of these findings for mentoring theory and practice, especially the matching process, are discussed.