Analysis Of The Causes And Consequences Of Negative Mentoring Experiences In The Work-Family Context: Breaking The Vicious Cycle Of Family-Work-Family Conflict

Today,China is in a critical period of transformation from a manufacturer of quantity to one of quality.The key to achieve this goal is to carry forward the craftsman spirit of rigorous,serious,and pursuing perfection and to cultivate talents who strive for perfection and are brave to innovate like a craftsman.However,Craftsman type talents are hard to get through training,mentoring program is the essence of technology transfer.Therefore,to complete the transformation from “Made in China” to “Created in China”,we must attach importance to mentoring program.For a single enterprise,the contribution of mentoring program to the human capital promotion and the maintenance of enterprise's competitive advantage should not be ignored.On the one hand,mentoring program can help new employees to get familiar with the work content and master the necessary skills as soon as possible.On the other hand,it can also help new employees understand and identify with enterprise culture and increase their commitment to the enterprise.However,as more and more companies take mentoring program as an important means of human resource management,only to find that mentoring is not always as effective as expected.Protégés or mentors are likely to be disappointed,discontent,or disharmonious in the relationships.Such negative events may greatly reduce the effectiveness of the mentoring relationship,and accordingly do harm to the protégé,the mentor,and the organization.Past research has also pointed out that any kind of relationships,regardless of the relationship between colleagues,between a supervisor and a subordinate,or the intimate partnership in one's life,may be influenced by harmonious factors and unpleasant events,from the relatively mild quarrel to more severe physical or psychological abuse,so does the mentoring relationship.The events and behaviors that lead to the invalid or abnormal mentoring relationship is called negative mentoring experiences.What are the causes of these negative mentoring experiences? What is the impact on mentors,protégés,and organizations? How should companies avoid and respond? These are the questions that theory and practice are eager to answer.Besides,as the relationship between work and family getting more and more closely,work-family balance problems becoming increasingly prominent,organizations should not only find answers in work and organizations,but also in employees' life domain.As we know,promoting employees' career development and the personal life are two basic functions of mentoring relationships.However,existing research focus mostly on the work and career related cause and consequence,the factors in non-work areas has been ignored.Therefore,this study attempts to explore the antecedents and consequences of negative mentoring experience in the field of nonworking based on the work-family relationships.Specifically,the main research subjects of this study are that under the workfamily background,will the disharmonious relationship between the mentor and his/her partner in family life affect the relationship between the mentors and the protégés,resulting in the protégés' negative mentoring experiences? Does the negative relationship between the mentor and the protégés affect their family in turn and how does it affect the family life of mentors and protégés? Faced with the above situation,what should enterprises do to break the vicious circle of the negative impact from family to work and then to family? To answer these questions,the following four substudies were designed based on the Conservation of Resources Theory.Study 1 attempts to examine the applicability of the negative mentoring experience scale in Chinese context.First of all,we translate the protégé negative mentoring experience scale developed by Eby and her colleagues into Chinese version.Then we examine the applicability,reliability,and effectiveness of the scale in the Chinese context through project analysis,reliability test,content validity test,and structural validity test.The results showed that all the items in the negative mentoring experience scale developed by Eby could be applied in the Chinese context after translation and improvement.Integrated the result of Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis,the fit of the five-factor structure of the original scale is better than the four-factor structure developed in this study.Therefore,we decided to keep the original five dimensions in this study.Study 2 started from the mentors' family domain and focused on the factors of negative mentoring experience in the family domain.Specifically,study 2,based on the COR theory,attempts to answer how the mentor perceived spouse undermining affects the relationship between mentors and protégés at work through the mediated mechanism of emotional exhaustion,so as to increase the protégés' perception of negative mentoring experiences.And how this process is influenced by the mentor perceived ethical leadership and the independent self-construal of the mentor.Based on the paired data of 194 mentors and 237 protégés from Shanghai,Anhui,and Sichuan,the results showed mentor perceived spouse undermining would have a positive impact on the negative mentoring experience of the protégés by increasing the emotional exhaustion of the mentors.Ethical leadership can effectively weaken the positive relationship between emotional exhaustion and the protégé negative mentoring experience,as well as the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion between mentor perceived spouse undermining and the protégé negative mentoring experience.Moreover,the moderating effect of ethical leadership is influenced by the independent self-construal of mentors,and the moderating effect of ethical leadership is stronger for mentors with low independent self-construal.Study 3 started from the mentors' work domain,and based on study 2,conversely explored the influence of protégé negative mentoring experiences on the mentors' family life.Specifically,study 3 also used the COR theory,integrated with the theory of ego depletion to explain how the protégé negative mentoring experiences can lead the mentors into ego depletion and thus lead to work-family conflict.And what roles does the mentor perceived ethical leadership and the mentor independent self-construal play in this process? A sample of 188 mentors and 229 protégés from an enterprise in Shanghai was used to test our hypotheses.The results showed that the protégé negative mentoring experience had a positive effect on the work-family conflict of the mentors by increasing mentors' ego depletion.The moderating effect has not been supported when ethical leadership was the only moderator.However,the interaction of ethical leadership and mentor independent self-construal can influence the relationship between mentor ego depletion and work-family conflict and the mediating role of mentor ego depletion.When ethical leadership is higher and independent self-construal is lower,the impact of ego depletion on work-family conflict and the mediation of ego depletion is the weakest.This result shows that the effectiveness of ethical leadership is largely influenced by the individuals' self-construal characteristics.From the perspective of protégés,study 4 explored how the relationship between protégés and mentors in the workplace affected the family life of protégés.Specifically,study 4,still based on the COR theory and the theory of ego depletion,attempts to explore how the protégé negative mentoring experience can lead to their own workfamily conflict through the mediating role of ego depletion and the impact of protégéperceived participative leadership during this process.Based on the data analysis of262 protégés from Shanghai,Anhui,Sichuan,the results showed that the protégénegative mentoring experiences has a positive effect on work-family conflict by increasing their ego depletion.Protégé perceived participative leadership moderated the positive relationship between ego depletion and work-family conflict and the mediating role of ego depletion.Protégés who perceive more participative leadership,are less likely impact by ego depletion.Based on the background of work-family relationship and negative mentoring experience,this study build a “two-way” “tripartite” spillover-crossover model,in which the negative effect spillover from family to work,and then from work to family through the interpersonal interaction between partners and mentor-protégé.Overall,this study has a distinct theoretical contribution to the fields of mentoring relationship,negative mentoring experience,work-family relationship,the COR theory,emotional exhaustion,ego depletion,leadership and so on.It has a certain practical guiding significance for enterprises to avoid and cope with negative mentoring experience and alleviate work-family conflict.Finally,this study also summarizes some shortcomings and possible research directions in the future.