Mentoring effect on competency development

“How do mentors affect the development of team members’ competencies?”

Evidence on the mentoring effect on EC development mirrored the findings of the effect on team processes. Results indicated that effects were undesirable the more the mentoring style was disengaged and directive, while the case was opposite with a non-directive and listening approach combined with a more proactive involvement. Reciprocity was affected by the mentoring style, and in turn had a strong influence on the ability of the mentors to deploy other functions like professional development and role modelling. With higher involvement, topics were also more frequently discussed, which led to better deployment of the professional development and assisting personal growth functions.

Evidence also suggests that intervention quality was affected by mentoring style, and mentors who listened to every team member and asked questions had better effect. The most prominent example was in the case of conflict resolution with Team D, where the mentor challenged them on how they viewed themselves and each other as people and partners. In this case, the role modelling function was deployed, leading to an increase in self-awareness for the team members. Respondents in teams with

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directive and disengaged mentors complained about the poor effect of this approach when comparing to interventions they had with non-directive and listening mentors at later stages of the program.

Interestingly, these results mirror what St-Jean and Audet (2013) found when exploring the proposals of Gravells (2006). Similarities between their findings and those of this study were found despite the different contexts of research, suggesting that the observed effects of mentoring style are likely to be consistent across different entrepreneurship mentoring schemes and situations. While their study used a survey and found correlations between the styles and deployed mentor functions, the empirical analysis in this study contributes to explain more detailed qualitative reasons behind the occurrence of these results.

The important effect of high reciprocity and trust in relationships were also found by Couteret and Audet (2012) when looking at development through coaching in an incubation context. Their reasoning was that this was a key part of breaking down resistance to change that arose when the methods and self-awareness of the entrepreneur was challenged. In addition, they found that a characteristic of the entrepreneur had a large effect on this issue and being receptive to learning and change was a key part of explaining development. Evidence in this study also suggests this to be important, while it might also indicate that the relationship and receptiveness were consistently being built and mutually affects each other over time.

5.4 Limitations

Selection of participants for the program was not taken into account. Combined with the relatively small sample size of the study, this might have affected the implications due to participants being selected from 12500 talented people. These people were mostly chosen for their motivation and in part skills, which must be considered. I expected the main difference to be in motivational factors; that it would be higher than with for example students in entrepreneurship education programs. As all except one of the teams were committed and worked a lot consistently, the assumption held. Everyone was also young, and many did not have entrepreneurship experience. One could argue that, as a consequence, observed mentor effects were partly bound by the constraints of following up young, inexperienced entrepreneurs and that they might be different when following up people who actually run a business. However, the findings of St-Jean and Audet (2013) were similar both on mentor functions and interventions style despite their research being done on actual small-business owners with mostly quantitative methods and larger sample sizes, implying that findings are valid despite contextual limitations.

108 On another note, this study utilized the relatively broad mentor function definition of Jacobi (1991) which were drawn from literature within management studies, academia and psychology while not being explicitly related to an entrepreneurial context. Conceptual differentiation could be improved by comparing and refining these with the more extensive mentor functions framework of St-Jean (2011), which were not accessible to the author until a late stage of writing. He found four psychological functions, four functions related to entrepreneurial career development and one role model function.

However, they called for more research on the topic as well. It is evident that this field is under-researched, and I suggest directing more attention to this field, taking into account the strong effects mentors have when following up teams.

Furthermore, terminology inconsistencies within the fields of EL, EC, team development and mentoring often led to difficulties and confusion during the writing and analysis. The definition of the term “entrepreneurial competencies” might also be unfit for general use due to including motivational factors. One could consider switching the term to “entrepreneurial capabilities”. The theoretical framework was also based on three fields of research with many internal dissonances and lack of consensus on term interpretation. Some term usages were also inconsistent with their general definition, and changes were made to remedy this. Specifically, the knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) underwent several changes and was also contextualized to better visualize and guide the interrogation of the data. These changes can in the future be done even more rigorously to avoid misunderstandings and better differentiate between similar concepts.

The survey measure of developed competencies was useful to visualize data, guide analysis and find trends. However, they were not reliable enough to use them for more detailed quantitative comparison. Mentors might have been consciously or sub-consciously biased towards certain teams or team members based on their relation to them. Some mentors might be more critical than others when ranking. Terminology might also have been an issue here, despite having provided mentors with detailed explanations, a walkthrough of the terminology and being available for questions while they were taking the survey, they might have misunderstood terms due to not being familiar with them compared to their practice in the program. Candidate terms for misunderstanding are opportunity recognition, marketing, resource, self-awareness, entrepreneurial passion, self-efficacy, adapting to uncertainty and perseverance. As the survey was done retrospectively, memory might have been a problem, but the summary interviews were done before the survey was done and their memory of the team journeys should be more valid as a result. Finally, all developments in each period might not have been captured, but mentors used the opportunity to comment on it whenever they did not, which provided many useful quotes for triangulation.

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Moreover, the assumptions on remote work and the difference in culture and so forth seemed logical. The “amplitude” of outcomes from typical team processes was larger than they would likely have been in a team of people from the same culture working in the same location. However, there might be effects that the author did not find from the combination of these limitations. Nevertheless, the depth of sample data in this study was very rich and therefore provided an extensive overview when analysed through triangulation. Therefore, the choices, limitations and result validity of the study are viewed as satisfactory for an exploratory study.

Similar future studies would probably do well to (a) improve competency evaluation and contextualize them depending on the use purpose, (b) do more rigorous tracking of team process development, phases they go through and focus more on the differences between interpersonal and task-based conflicts (c) ensure rigorous terminology usage. Furthermore, as this study focused on the mentor functionality from the learner perspective, complementary studies could focus both on program content and the characteristics and competencies of the mentor, which were not the topic of focus in this thesis.