Mentorship and creativity: Effects of mentor creativity and mentoring style

Jian Wang,Sotaro Shibayama

doi:10.1016/j.respol.2021.104451

Jian Wang, Sotaro Shibayama

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2021.104451

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Abstract

This paper examines mentorship as a mechanism for individuals to acquire and develop creativity. More specifically, we study the effect of mentor creativity on protégé creativity and how this effect is moderated by the mentoring styles of autonomy and exploration. Our empirical analysis focuses on formal PhD supervision and training, drawing on survey and bibliometric data for 143 life-science professors (mentors) and their 685 PhD students (protégés). We find that the effect of mentor creativity on protégé creativity is insignificant during protégés’ PhD studies but becomes significantly positive after protégés hold faculty positions, suggesting that the mentorship effect takes time to manifest but is enduring. Furthermore, the effect of mentor creativity on protégé creativity is significant only when protégés have high levels of autonomy and exploration during PhD studies. This suggests the importance of autonomy and exploration in the effective transfer of creativity from mentors to protégés.

Highlights

In modern organizations and society, knowledge is the source of competitiveness and the engine of growth, so it is crucial that knowledge workers are sustainably developed for the continual production of new knowledge (Argote and Ingram, 2000; Grant, 1996; Hatch and Dyer, 2004; Teece et al, 1997)
We focus on two important aspects of mentoring style: (1) autonomy, defined as giving the protege freedom to plan and execute their own research activities, and (2) exploration, defined as allowing the protege to work on areas that are distant from the existing expertise of the mentor
The general model specification can be described as follows: ymp = α + βT xmp + μm + εmp where m is the mentor index, and p is the protege index. ymp is the dependent variable for protege p of mentor m. α is the intercept. xmp is the vector of independent variables, and β is the corresponding vector of coefficients. μm is the error term specific to the mentor, which does not change between proteges and may be correlated with independent variables. εmp is the idiosyncratic error term, which is assumed to be well-behaved and in dependent of independent variables and μm

Summary

Introduction

In modern organizations and society, knowledge is the source of competitiveness and the engine of growth, so it is crucial that knowledge workers are sustainably developed for the continual production of new knowledge (Argote and Ingram, 2000; Grant, 1996; Hatch and Dyer, 2004; Teece et al, 1997). This paper contributes to this literature by exploring mentorship as a mechanism for individuals to acquire and develop creativity at the personal level. Mentorship plays an important role in transferring creativity from experienced workers to novices (Chao et al, 1992; Feldman, 1981; Kram, 1985; Ragins and Cotton, 1999; Scandura, 1992). The role of mentorship in nurturing creativity has not yet been systematically examined. It has been elusive how inexperi enced workers acquire various skills from experienced workers and how it feeds into their own creativity (Hatch and Dyer, 2004; Shipton et al, 2005; Tharenou et al, 2007)

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