As employment of college students and career development become national problems due to the economic crisis, increase in youth unemployment and decrease in employment of enterprises are creating a vicious circle. Various measures to overcome the phen...
As employment of college students and career development become national problems due to the economic crisis, increase in youth unemployment and decrease in employment of enterprises are creating a vicious circle. Various measures to overcome the phenomenon are presented and realized by students and colleges but have insufficient effects. College mentoring is a program that engages public attention as a measures for new career development and organizational adaptation in these college organizations.
Mentoring has been already researched by domestic and foreign scholars. However, studies of mentoring for college students have focused only on development of programs restricted to specific majors or effects of mentoring. Also, tools to measure mentoring functions are developed for enterprise organization and there have been few studies of developing tools appropriate for characteristics of college organization. In this context, the purpose of this study is to investigate effects of relation characteristics of mentors and proteges in college student mentoring on mentoring functions. For doing this, the author classified the relation characteristics of mentors and proteges into social status of mentors, gender composition of mentoring, and types of mentoring communication, identifying effects of each variable on mentoring functions.
As for the data collection for this study, 192 questionnaires were collected from college students majoring in humanities in colleges located in Seoul, and the data was analyzed by T-test and regression analysis by using dummy variable, by using the SPSS/Windows 17.0 Program.
According to the results of the analysis, professor mentors, office worker mentors, and family mentors affected proteges in functions of role models. As for the gender composition of mentoring, homogeneous groups of males did not affect psycho-social functions, and heterogeneous groups of male mentors affected career development. Meanwhile, groups of female mentors did not have peculiar effects on mentoring functions. As for the types of mentoring communication, the functions of role models were more affected as the influence of types of direct communication was enhanced. According to the results of the regression analysis by using dummy variable on the effects of each variable on mentoring functions, no variables were shown to affect functions of career development. As for the psycho-social functions, family mentors, female mentor groups, and direct communication groups had effects. Office worker mentors, professor mentors, and family mentors were shown to affect the functions of role models.
The significance of this study is as follows. First, unlike the results of the existing studies, this study measured mentoring functions by using a tool for measuring mentoring for college students. Second, this study investigated the relation characteristics of mentors and proteges and the relations of mentoring functions in presently-performing mentoring. Third, this study is expected to serve as support in the future, given the fact that not many colleges conduct formal mentoring programs despite the necessity and demands.