| There is a paucity of research addressing mentoring relationships among minority nurses, particularly African American nurse educators, relating to job satisfaction and occupation commitment. The researcher examined mentoring and its relationship to job satisfaction and occupational commitment in African American nursing faculty at HBCUs. The conceptual framework is based on Meyers et al.'s Occupational Commitment Model and the Organizational Culture Theory of Tierney as applied to African American nursing faculty. The researcher used a quantitative, causal-comparative and cross-sectional correlational design to examine the impact of mentoring and its relationship to the normative domain of occupational commitment and job satisfaction for African American nurse faculty who either teach or have taught at a HBCU. In addition, the researcher determined if relationships existed between job satisfaction and occupational commitment (normative) for mentored African American nursing faculty. Data were collected by a self-administered survey from 38 full-time and part-time African American nursing faculty working at HBCUs in the U.S. The survey consisted of demographic information, the Quality of Mentoring Instrument, Occupational Commitment Instrument, and the Minority Nurse Faculty Survey Attitudinal Scale. The results of this study revealed there is not a significant difference in normative occupational commitment scores between African American nursing faculty who have been mentored and those who have not been mentored. In addition, there is a statistical significant difference in the overall job satisfaction dimension scores between African American faculty who report being mentored and those who have not been mentored. Finally, there is not a statistically significant correlation between job satisfaction and occupational commitment scores for African American faculty who report being mentored. The literature has shown positive results of mentoring in academia. One of those benefits included retention of faculty. Thus, key stakeholders should consider mentoring as a strategy to increase the minority population of nursing faculty in academia. Further research should focus on the use of larger sample sizes, while expanding the scope to test more antecedents, different institutional types, and different mentoring types. |
