Supervisory mentoring and employee affective commitment and turnover: the critical role of contextual factors

Past research has largely ignored the role of contextual factors in the relationships between supervisory mentoring and individual and organizational outcomes. In order to fill this void, we investigate how job scope and career and development opportunities, two critical contextual factors, moderate the supervisory mentoring-affective commitment - turnover links. Integrating social exchange theory with insights from situational approaches to leadership, we hypothesized that (a) job scope would interact with supervisory mentoring in predicting affective commitment and (b) career and development opportunities would interact with affective commitment in predicting turnover such that the conditional effects of supervisory mentoring on turnover would be stronger at high levels of these contextual moderators. Results of a study conducted with a sample of 228 business alumni, using 15-month voluntary turnover as outcome, supported our predictions. We discuss the implications of these findings for mentoring research and practice.