Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper uses survey data collected as part of the third phase of the National Administrative Studies Project (NASP-III) to examine the effect of both perceived relationship quality and the degree of either instrumental (career-related) or psychosocial mentoring support on the career development, attitudes, and behaviors of managers in public and nonprofit sector organizations. For more than forty years scholastic inquiry has largely corroborated the beneficial role that workplace mentoring relationships play in employees’ professional lives. Studies have shown, for instance, that mentored individuals report higher job satisfaction, career mobility, recognition, promotion rates, and compensation, and that organizations likewise indirectly profit from enhanced socialization, engagement, performance, greater employee commitment, and lower reported turnover intentions. As public and nonprofit sector organizations are called to leverage their human capital to meet service demands under increasingly constrained circumstances, including the tripartite challenges of a rapidly aging workforce, a constrained economic environment, and increasing political uncertainty, it is not unreasonable to suggest that human resource management (HRM) and development (HRD) practices that promise to minimize these negative effects by increasing organizational commitment or facilitating the transfer of knowledge among employees—as mentoring is presumed to do—have immense practical value to an organization’s financial and cultural bottom line. The costs associated with attrition, after all, are not insignificant; some estimates place turnover-related costs between 150 and 200 percent of the value of an employee’s annual compensation, with one recent study suggesting that the figure may be as high as 213 percent. Nor are costs limited to the direct expenses associated with recruiting, selecting, or training replacements for vacated positions; organizations must also consider the additional, if less easily quantified, indirect costs associated with the loss of institutional knowledge and organizational memory and the ensuing disruption to relationships between peers, supervisors and their subordinates, and among teams. This is perhaps especially true for public sector organizations, where the impact of a disproportionately older workforce may be amplified by both restrictive personnel policies as well as challenges recruiting and retaining employees. These challenges are no less a problem in the nonprofit sector where lower salaries, a tighter resource base, increased demand for services, and a looming shortage of experienced executive directors contribute to the declining appeal of employment in these types of organizational settings. This paper speaks to these challenges and the role that workplace mentoring may play in offsetting them.