Effect of Mentorship Program on Mentees’ Psychosocial Development

The study investigates the role of mentorship in enhancing mentees’ psychosocial development. It utilized self-administered questionnaires completed by undergraduate military students at a public higher learning institution in Malaysia. The outcomes of SmartPLS path model analysis revealed two important findings: firstly, communication insignificantly correlated with psychosocial development. Secondly, support significantly correlated with psychosocial development. The results confirm that communication does not act as an important determinant of mentees’ psychosocial development. However, support does act as an important psychosocial development in the studied organization. This paper also provides discussion, implications and conclusion.


INTRODUCTION
Mentorship is a broad term and may be interpreted according to formal definition and through the use of images viewpoints. The image of the old, bearded, wise man can be traced back in Greek literature when Odysseus referred his son Telemachus for guidance in preparation for Trojan War Ismail & Ridzuan, 2012;Megginson & Clutterbuck, 1995). The word mentor may also refer to a "father figure" who sponsors, guides and develops a younger person (Ehrich, Lisa, Hansford & Tennent, 2004;. Mentors and mentees have played a significant role in teaching, inducting and developing the skills and talents of mentee. Mentorship has been receiving substantial attention among practitioners and academics as a means to professional and personal development (Little, Kearney & Britner, 2010) and/or counseling services (Gregson, 1994; Even though the nature of this relationship is significant, little has been left unexplained about the role of mentorship program as an important determinant of mentee outcomes in the mentorship program research literature (Allen & Finkelstein, 2003;Bernier et al., 2005;. Many scholars argue that this situation is related to the emphasis of many previous on the internal properties of mentorship program, employment of a simple survey method to explain different respondent perceptions toward particular mentorship program models and usage of a simple correlation analysis to measure the strength of association between mentorship program and mentees' psychosocial development. Hence, these studies have not provided sufficient information to be used as guidelines by practitioners in formulating strategic action plans to improve the design and administration of mentorship programs in dynamic environment of higher learning institutions (Bernier et al., 2005;Dutton, 2003;Ismail & Ridzuan, 2012). This phenomenon has motivated the researchers to further explore the nature of this relationship.

OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
This study has dual objectives: first, is to measure the relationship between communication and mentees' psychosocial development. Second, is to measure the relationship between support and mentees' psychosocial development.
The paper is structured to deliberate on three important issues: first, it discuses relevant theoretical and empirical evidence supporting the hypothesized model in the literature review section. Second, it explains results of data analysis in the finding section. Finally, it discusses the results in the light of the literature, shares some discussion, suggests some implications and draws conclusions of the study.

Psychosocial Development
Several studies were conducted using a direct effects model to investigate mentorship program based on different samples like perceptions of 88 participants of a large south eastern university in United States (Allen & Finkelstein, 2003), perceptions of 18 students at University of Brighton, United Kingdom (Dutton, 2003), perceptions of 110 students in Canadian colleges (Bernier et al., 2005) and perceptions of 196 students in teaching based higher learning institutions in Sarawak . These studies found that the ability of mentors to properly implement comfortable communication and provide adequate support in formal and/or informal mentorship relationships had been important determinants of mentees' psychosocial development in the respective organizations (Allen & Finkelstein, 2003;Bernier et al., 2005;Dutton, 2003;. These studies support the notion of adult learning theory. For example, Erikson's (1963) theory of psychosocial development proposes six basic concepts that strongly influenced the development of young adult's life span, namely, stage of development, development tasks, psychosocial crises, a central process for resolving the crisis at each stage, a radiating network of significant relationships, and coping. If a young adult is able to appropriately change International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 49 his/her life span, this may lead to improved psychosocial development (Newman, 2012). Meanwhile, Chickering's (1969) vector theory of identity development suggests seven factors which strongly affect the development of young adult identities which are developing competence, managing emotions, becoming autonomous, developing interpersonal relationships, establishing identity, developing purpose, and developing integrity. These theories argue that mentors help mentee achieve change in life span and gain better life span if mentors are able to appropriately implement comfortable communication and provide adequate support in mentorship activities. Mentoring may also lead to an enhanced mentees' psychosocial development in higher education institutions (Allen & Finkelstein, 2003;Bernier et al., 2005;Dutton, 2003).

Conceptual Framework and Research Hypothesis
The literature has been used as foundation of developing a conceptual framework as illustrated in Figure 1.

Independent Variable
Dependent Varible (Mentorship Program) Based on the framework, it can be hypothesized that: H1: There is a positive relationship between communication and mentees' psychosocial development. H2: There is a positive relationship between support and mentees' psychosocial development.

Research Design
This study used a cross-sectional research design which allows the researchers to integrate the mentorship program literature, unstructured interview, and the actual study as the primary joint procedure to gather data for this study. Such approaches are recommended to enable researchers to gather accurate data, decrease bias and increase the quality of data collected (Sekaran & Bougie, 2010;Zikmund, 2000). This study was conducted at a public higher learning institution in Malaysia. For confidential reasons, the name of the organization is kept anonymous. At the initial stage, survey questionnaires were prepared by incorporating input from mentorship program literature. After that, unstructured interviews were conducted involving 10 senior graduating students (2 nd year and above for three-year bachelor's programs), comprising five students from public and five from private institutions in order to

Communication
Mentees' Psychosocial Development Support

56
Volume 49 understand the nature of communication and support practiced in the mentorship programs, psychosocial development, and relationship between these variables in the organization. Information gained from the interviews was used to improve the content and format of survey questionnaire for an actual study. Further, a back translation technique was employed to translate the survey questionnaires into English and Malay languages in order to enhance the validity and reliability of research findings (Sekaran & Bougie, 2010;Zikmund, 2000).

Measures
This survey questionnaire is divided into three sections. First section is about communication. It was measured using 5 items adapted from mentorship communication system literature (Foxon, 1993 Noe, 1988;Noe,). The dimensions used to measure psychosocial were confident, adaptation, and sharing personal experiences. All items used in the questionnaires were measured using a 7-item Likert scale ranging from "strongly disagree/dissatisfied" (1) to "strongly agree/satisfied" (7). Demographic variables were used as controlling variables because this study focused on student attitudes.

Sample
A convenient sampling technique was employed to distribute 250 survey questionnaires to undergraduate military students in the studied organization. This sampling technique was chosen because the management of the organizations did not allow the researchers to perform random sampling procedures. Out of the total number, 107 questionnaires were returned to the researchers, yielding 42.8 percent response rate. The survey questionnaires were answered by participants based on their consents and on voluntarily basis.

Data Analysis
The survey questionnaire data was analyzed using the SmartPLS 2.0. This statistical package has several advantages where it may deliver latent variable scores, avoid small sample size problems, estimate every complex models with many latent and manifest variables, hassle stringent assumptions about the distribution of variables and error terms, and handle both reflective and formative measurement models (Henseler et al., 2009;Ringle et al., 2005). The SmartPLS path model was employed to assess the magnitude and nature of the relationship between many independent variables and one or more dependent variables in the structural model using standardized beta (β) and t statistics. The value of R 2 is used as an indicator of the overall predictive strength of the model. The value of R 2 is interpreted as follows: 0.19 (weak), 0.33 (moderate) and 0.67 (substantial) as suggested by Chin (1998), and

Sample Profile
The respondents'characteristics show that majority of the respondents were males (65.4 %), with age ranging from 20 to 22 years (75.7 %), 41.1 % of the sample comprises first year students and followed by second year students (32.7%), almost half of the students achieve CGPA between 3.01 and 3.50 (48.5 %), and 77.6% of the sample belong to Faculty of Defence & Management Studies.

Validity and Reliability Analyses
The confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the psychometric properties of survey questionnaire data. Table 2 shows results of convergent and discriminant validity analyses. All constructs had values of average variance extracted (AVE) larger than 0.5, which is within the acceptable standard of convergent validity (Henseler et al., 2009). All constructs also had the values of AVE square root (in diagonal) greater than the squared 58 Volume 49 correlation with other constructs (in off diagonal). This shows that all constructs met the acceptable standard of discriminant validity.  Table 3 shows the factor loadings and cross loadings for different constructs. The correlation between items and factors had higher loadings than other items in the different constructs, as well as the loadings of variables were greater than 0.7 in their own constructs in the model are considered adequate (Henseler et al., 2009), thus the validity of measurement model met the criteria. The values of composite reliability and Cronbach's Alpha were greater than 0.8, indicating that the instrument used in this study had high internal consistency (Henseler et al., 2009;Nunally & Benstein, 1994).  Table 4 shows that the mean values for the variables range from 5.4 to 5.7, showing that the levels of communication, support, psychosocial and academic performance are ranging from high (4) to highest levels (7). The correlation coefficients for the relationship between the independent variable (i.e., communication and support) and the dependent variable (i.e., psychosocial development) are less than 0.90, indicating the data are not affected by serious collinearity problem (Hair, Anderson, Tatham & Black, 2006). Testing Hypotheses 1 and 2 Figure 2 shows the outcomes of SmartPLS path model for testing the direct effects model. In terms of exploratory analysis of the model, the inclusion of communication and support in the analysis had explained 26 percent of the variance in dependent variable. Specifically, the results of testing hypothesis highlighted two important findings: first, communication is insignificantly correlated with psychosocial development (β=0.11; t=1.41), therefore H1 is accepted. Second, support is significantly correlated with psychosocial development (β=0.53; t=6.01), therefore H2 is also accepted. This result demonstrates that communication does not act as an important determinant of mentees' psychosocial development, but support does act as an important determinant of mentees' psychosocial development in the studied organization.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
This study demonstrates that mentorship program does act as an important determinant of mentees' psychosocial development in the studied organization. In the context of this study, mentors have appropriately planned and implemented mentorship activities according to broad policies and procedures formulated by the stakeholder. According to the majority of respondents, the levels of communication, support and psychosocial development are high in the organization. This situation indicates that the ability of mentors to appropriately implement communication and support in mentorship activities may lead to an enhanced mentees' psychosocial development in the organization.
These findings provide three major implications: theoretical contribution, robustness of research methodology, and practical contribution. From the persective of theoretical contribution, the results of this study display two important findings: first, support has been an important determinant of mentees' psychosocial development in the organizational sample. This result is also consistent with studies by Allen and Finkelstein (2003) With respect to the robustness of research methodology, the survey questionnaires used in this study have met the acceptable standards of validity and reliability analyses. This attribute may lead to the production of accurate and reliable findings.
With regard to practical contribution, the findings of this study may be used as guidelines by practitioners to improve the management of mentorship programs in higher learning institutions. In order to realize these objectives, management should consider the following aspects: firstly, to improve training content and methods for mentors in order to enhance their competencies in interpersonal communication, teaching, counseling and guiding different mentee backgrounds. Secondly, to form mentorship groups based on students' academic performance in order to facilitate mentors making proper plans to fulfill the requirements of mentees who have different levels of academic performance. Thirdly, to ensure that mentors plan and implement the various kinds of attractive activities in order to motivate mentees to commit with the programs. Fourth, to remind mentors to train high performing students to be co-mentors and/or role models to other students in formal and/or informal mentorship activities. If the management pay special attention to the suggestions, the former may be able to strongly encourage mentees to support the goals of mentorship program in higher learning institutions.

CONCLUSION
This study tested a theoretical framework that was developed based on the research on higher education mentorship program. The confirmatory factor analysis showed that the measurement scale used in this study met the acceptable standards of validity and reliability analyses. Furthermore, the outcomes of SmartPLS path model analysis confirmed that communication was not significantly correlated with mentees' psychosocial development, thus rejecting H1. This result may be affected by external factors such as different judgements and values of the participating respondents about the benefits of mentorship programs, high power distance culture increases communication gap in the mentorship activities, and unequal capabilities among mentors to practice comfortable communication in mentorship activities. These factors may override the effectiveness of communication practices in the higher learning institution mentorship program. However, support was significantly correlated with mentees' psychosocial development, therefore giving support to H2. These results are supporting and broadening studies mostly published in Western countries. Mentorship program does act as an important determinant of mentees' psychosocial development in the organization under study. Therefore, current research and practice within the higher education student development model need to consider communication and support as strategic dimensions of organizational mentorship program. This study further suggests that the capability of mentors to appropriately plan and manage formal and/or informal mentorship activities will induce subsequent positive mentee outcomes (e.g., self-efficacy, career and leadership). Thus, these positive outcomes may help maintain and enhance the level of academic performance of higher learning institutions.