Since the 1993 inception of the mentoring program in the U.S. Navy, little evidence has been collected on its effectiveness, primarily because of difficulties with instrumentation and conceptualization in conducting such assessments. The purpose of this correlational study was to identify external factors affecting military protégés' satisfaction with their mentoring experience. The conceptual framework of this study was based on Kram's mentor model theory, which includes career and psychosocial support functions. A 5-item Likert survey instrument was designed to measure the dependent variables of satisfaction with career mentoring and satisfaction with personal mentoring against 10 independent variables: dyad compatibility, mentor training, dyad geography, mentoring functions, mentor/protégé gender, challenging job assignments, protégé visibility, mentor leadership, time management, and protégé career expectations. The survey was completed by a total of 538 participants, selected among the service personnel of 17 U.S. Navy aviation squadrons in the enlisted ranks of E1 through E6. Ten simple linear regressions were performed with a level of significance of .001. All 10 independent variables were significantly related to satisfaction with both career and personal mentoring. The study results suggested, however, that career mentoring was favored to a greater extent than was personal mentoring by protégés, with the effect sizes ranging from 5% to 48% for career mentoring and from 3% to 22% for personal mentoring. Furthermore, Kram's theory was a useful lens to evaluate mentoring in this population. The implications for positive social change include informing program administrators in the U.S. Navy of the benefits to their units to evaluate and improve the design and the implementation of career and personal mentoring.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:waldenu.edu/oai:scholarworks.waldenu.edu:dissertations-2214 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| Creators | Strickland, Jeffrey Wayne |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks |
| Source Sets | Walden University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies |
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