Industrial and Organizational Psychology Commons^™

Seeking Quality Mentors: Exploring Program Design Characteristics To Increase An Individual’S Likelihood To Participate As A Mentor, Kristen Voetmann

Industrial-Organizational Psychology Dissertations

Previous mentoring research has focused on informal mentoring relationships, but as formal mentoring programs proliferate throughout organizations as a means to train and retain high-quality employees, there is a need for more empirical research investigating the specific elements of formal mentoring programs that positively impact their success. The purpose of the current study, therefore, is to explore the causal relationship between formal mentoring program design characteristics and the likelihood that a qualified individual will choose to participate as a mentor. This relationship is examined through the hypothesized mediator of potential mentors’ perceptions of organizational support. Participants were recruited through Amazon’s …

Obtaining Sponsorship In Organizations By Developing Trust Through Outside Of Work Socialization, Katie Kirkpatrick-Husk

Industrial-Organizational Psychology Dissertations

Sponsorship, defined as a relationship that produces objective career benefits for the person being sponsored, has recently grown in popularity in the media. This study sought to examine antecedents to sponsorship by testing the hypothesis that socializing outside of work with another individual leads to increased affect-based trust, which in turn positively affects the willingness to sponsor him or her. A dual-experimental design was employed to test this proposal in which the independent variable was manipulated in one experiment, and the mediator was manipulated in the second.

The study included 492 participants from the United States, 35% were female, and …