| dc.description.abstract | In this age of enterprise competition and information knowledge economy, it becomes ever precious with the heritage and development of organizing practical experience from senior mentors. The implementation of formalized mentor function system enables protégé to improve adaptability, and integration into specific enterprise culture. In return mentors themselves will improve upon their leadership and professional skills as well in the process. This application will not only enable enterprise reduce turn-over rate of new employees, but also benefit both senior mentors and protégé. In addition, it can improve enterprise performance, upgrade organization efficiency, and optimize enterprise competitiveness. Kram (1985) pointed out protégé in mentor function system can benefit in professional career, psychosocial function and role modeling application. (Scandura & Ragins, 1993).
This study investigates the formal apprenticeship based on social exchange theory, use formalized mentor function system to verify different levels of trust with specific practice between protégé and mentor. In addition, among the existing internal enterprise job-level system, subordinates can accept inequality from superiors to a certain degree, this is a critical cultural value in the Chinese society. This study is intended to understand whether protégé power distance and mentor power distance can strengthen or weaken their perception of protégé and mentor relationship. As to the selection of mentors and new recruits, this study provides on - site reference to facilitate companies that utilize formalized mentoring system strategy. This study adopted a one-to-one matching questionnaire for data collection and verification, totally 177 pairs of mentor-protégé dyads with the objective to implement the formalized apprentice and mentor system.
The findings are: ( 1 ) If there is affect-base trust between protégé and mentor, then there is significant positive impact among career-related function, psychosocial function, and role modeling. ( 2 ) If there is cognition-base trust between protégé and mentor, then there is significant positive impact among career-related function, and role modeling. ( 3 ) If the protégé power distance between protégé and mentor is in cognition-base trust, then there is significant positive impact on career-related function and role modeling. ( 4 ) If the mentor power distance between protégé and mentor is in affec-base trust, then there is significant negative impact on career-related function.
To summarize the above findings, this study discovered that when implementing a formal protégé and mentor function, trust between protégé and mentor has a significant positive impact, and creates benefit for all three parties involved: protégé, mentor, and enterprise.
This study recommends when practitioners implement formal protégé and mentor function system, adjustments can be made to factors involved in protégé power distance and mentor power distance proposed in this study, so that to achieve enhanced performance of enterprise practice on mentor function. And further to achieve improved adaptability and subsequent job performance for protégé.
Key words: trust, mentoring function, mentoring relationship, power distance
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