The influence of leadership mentoring on the development of employee's career

Abstract

Leadership mentoring is deemed as a paramount aspect in helping employees to develop their careers to their full capacity optimally. This study is aimed at identifying whether mentorship is present inside the study population and, if any, which type of leadership style the study population found their mentors to be most closely associated with. The leadership styles included and discussed throughout this study are transactional, transformational, charismatic and servant leadership style. As communication is an important component of any relationship, with specific reference to mentoring relationships, the study also sought to identify the levels and extent of communication between the mentor and mentees. The combination of the factors mentioned above, coupled with the statistical information inferred by these factors, results in an illustration of how leadership mentoring and the specific style thereof ultimately leads to the positive or negative development of the careers of employees. Results were obtained from the data collected by the Likert scale questionnaire that was distributed to participants to complete. These majority of the respondents work inside the call centre at a major insurance group. Based on statistical information obtained from this questionnaire, the employees inside the company do, in fact, receive mentoring to some extent where participants identified their mentors as transformational leaders. Although transformational leadership is the most prominent style found, the study identified charismatic- and servant leadership to also be strongly correlated with mentorship. In addition, healthy communication exists inside the company, which is an essential characteristic in the development of employees’ careers. Along with healthy and effective communication, factors such as personal and professional support provided by mentors are also contributing factors to mentoring with the subsequent effect of the optimal development of the employees’ careers.