Elsevier

Journal of Vocational Behavior

Volume 108, October 2018, Pages 201-213
Journal of Vocational Behavior

Results-masked-review article
Mentoring for mental health: A mixed-method study of the benefits of formal mentoring programmes in the English police force

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2018.08.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Recent research suggests that mentors can enhance their mentees' mental health. Yet little is known about the effect of mentoring on the anxieties of the mentors themselves. We hypothesise that mentoring programmes can have a positive impact on both mentees' and mentors' mental health. In a multi-method longitudinal study, we explore empirically the effect of a formal mentoring programme in the English police force on senior police officers' levels of anxiety. In the first step of our study, we conducted a field experiment. This experiment yielded preliminary results that suggest mentors may experience marginally lower levels of anxiety and feel as if their job is more meaningful when they participate in the mentoring programme. As a second step, we qualitatively investigated the subjective experience of the participants to explain and substantiate our findings. We found that mentoring relationships provide a unique context for mentors to discuss and normalise their concerns, to share ideas for managing anxieties, and to find more meaning in their work. We discuss our findings in terms of mentoring theory and consider their practical implications for improving mental health in the workplace.

Introduction

In England alone, the annual expenditure on healthcare for mental illness is £14 billion (LSE CEP, 2012). In addition, mental illness reduces England's gross domestic product by £52 billion each year, reflecting the loss of output from individuals who are unable to work or to work to their full capacity (Centre for Mental Health, 2010; LSE CEP, 2012). As such, mental illness is a serious concern not just for individual employees but also for their employers and wider society.

One approach to address mental health issues in the workplace is mentoring. Mentoring is a relationship where a more experienced individual (the mentor) provides guidance and support to a less experienced organizational member (the mentee) (Kram, 1985). Mentoring theory (Ragins & Kram, 2007) suggests that mentors can provide their mentees with two types of support: career-related and psychosocial (Kram, 1985; Noe, 1988; Ragins & McFarlin, 1990). Psychosocial support typically takes the form of counselling, friendship, or personal and emotional guidance (Fowler & O'Gorman, 2005). Career-related support in mentoring relationships can help mentees to “learn the ropes,” leading to higher job performance ratings and enhanced satisfaction (Scandura & Williams, 2004). Collectively, psychosocial and career support can build mentees' trust with their mentors, which is also assumed to yield socio-emotional benefits (Young and Perrewe, 2000a, Young and Perrewe, 2000b). These two types of support indicate that mentoring has positive implications for the mental health of mentees. Relatedly, a recent meta-analysis of mentoring research demonstrated that mentoring programmes can reduce mentees' stress and strain (Eby, Allen, Evans, Ng, & Dubois, 2008).

There is, however, much less empirical evidence to assess if the mental health benefits of mentoring extend to the mentors themselves. Taking the mentor's perspective is crucial in designing efficient mentoring programmes (Allen, 2007; Ragins & Scandura, 1999). In a similar way to mentees, mentors might also enjoy both psycho-social and career-related mental health benefits, albeit in different ways and through different mechanisms. The absence of evidence regarding the positive effect of mentoring on mentors' mental health reflects a broader issue in mentoring research and theory, where studies tend to focus on mentees (Allen, Eby, O'Brien, & Lentz, 2008). This issue is compounded by the fact that >80% of mentoring research is purely quantitative and cross-sectional (Allen et al., 2008), which limits opportunities for mentors to discuss or explain their experiences. In this way, understanding the complex link we could expect to find between mentoring and mental health may require fine-grained qualitative approaches (Schonfeld & Mazzola, 2015), in addition to more formal quantitative testing. The relationship between mentoring and mental health remains to be fully explored (Eby et al., 2008).

To deepen our understanding of how mentoring may inform both mentors' and mentees' workplace anxieties, we examined English police officers who volunteered to participate in a formal mentoring programme as either mentors or mentees. This is an appropriate setting as mental health issues are particularly prominent within occupations that play important social roles, such as the military (Caddick, Smith, & Phoenix, 2015; Hatch et al., 2013), medical professions (Yelin et al., 1996), firefighters and, police officers (Alexander & Walker, 1999). To ascertain the impact of a mentoring programme on anxiety, in particular, we employed an abductive approach that lends itself to the use of mixed methods (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012; Wheeldon & Åhlberg, 2012). This allowed us to begin by testing our baseline proposition that a mentoring programme can reduce anxiety levels through a field experiment occurring over eight months. In this experiment, we compared a treatment set of mentor-mentee dyads that actually experienced the mentoring programme to a control group of similar police officers. To build on the insightful yet restricted findings established through this experiment, we refined our exploration of the benefits of mentoring through an extensive longitudinal qualitative study. Our qualitative approach utilised phenomenological interviews to elicit the experiences of a separate cohort of mentors and mentees over nine months.

This study provides several contributions to mentoring theory. First, it unveils the positive role of mentoring in anxiety-prone work settings for mentors themselves. It therefore helps to provide a fuller account of mentoring by exploring the impact on mentors, as previous literature has tended to focus on mentees (Chun, Sosik, & Yun, 2012). Second, it adds to the limited longitudinal and qualitative studies that explore the subjective experiences of mentoring participants, particularly in terms of their mental health. This qualitative exploration reveals how mentoring can reduce mentors' anxieties by providing a unique context for officers to discuss and normalise their concerns while also making their work more meaningful. This has significant practical and societal implications as it demonstrates how the organizational practise of mentoring can support the mental health of some professionals who play crucial social roles.

Section snippets

Mentoring and mental health

More than thirty years ago, Kathy Kram, 1983, Kram, 1985 qualitative research identified two broad functions of mentoring in the workplace: career and psychosocial support, both peaking during the cultivation period of the mentoring relationships. Career functions described mentors providing their mentees with sponsorship, coaching, and challenging work assignments to enable them to understand corporate life and develop their careers. Psychosocial functions referred to role modelling,

Empirical approach and results

To examine our proposition that police officers experience less anxiety when they participate in a mentoring programme, we opted for an abductive empirical approach that lends itself to mixed-methods research (Wheeldon & Åhlberg, 2012). Thus, our empirical exploration of the effect of mentoring on the anxiety levels of police officers is two-fold. As a first step, we test our baseline hypothesis through the deductive approach of an exploratory field experiment. Then we use an extensive

Discussion

This study points to the existence of mental health benefits from mentoring programmes in the socially important profession of policing. Our quantitative results suggest that mentors are more likely to experience a reduction in anxiety compared to a treatment group not participating in the mentoring programme. Although the results should be treated with caution, it seems that the mentors felt as though their jobs were more meaningful when they provided mentoring. These results also revealed

Conclusion

While police officers are likely to experience work-related anxieties, these experiences often remain undisclosed or unaddressed. In this context, providing assistance may be difficult. Formal mentoring programmes can help to address this problem. Our study identified several benefits relating to mentoring programmes, showing in particular a positive impact on the mentors' levels of anxiety. We suggest that this occurs as mentoring provides a unique context for officers to discuss and normalise

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