Abstract
As a classic talent development model, mentoring still has irreplaceable value in scenarios that emphasize personalization, practice, and experience transfer. However, there are negative mentoring experiences in the mentor-protégé relationship, which have critical implications for both mentors and protégés as well as for organizational growth. Ongoing research, nevertheless, has only concentrated on its impacts on the individual protégé and ignored its impacts on the mentor. This paper constructs a moderated mediation research framework based on the Job Demands-Resources model, which not only examines the impact of a mentor's negative mentoring experiences on work-life balance but also highlights the mediating role of emotional exhaustion and the moderating role of prosocial motivation. By collecting and analyzing data from 141 employees from a large hotel group in South China who were currently mentoring others, we found that mentors' negative mentoring experience significantly and positively affected emotional exhaustion, but this was moderated by mentors' prosocial motivation. It is further found that emotional exhaustion mediated the relationship between mentors' negative mentoring experience and work-life balance, and fortunately, the mentor's prosocial motivation still moderates this mediating mechanism. The above findings, which are derived from mentors' own psychological experience, serve to enrich and improve the body of literature in the mentoring research field and have important managerial practice implications for organizations implementing the mentoring system for talent development.
Main Subjects
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