Successful mentors in academia: are they teachers, sponsors and/or collaborators?

ABSTRACT

Mentors in academia may act as teachers, sponsors and/or collaborators. However, so far there was no evidence on which role mentors should enact to best promote their mentees’ careers. This paper focuses on mentors in academia who are not the academic advisor. We provide first evidence on the relationship between the perceived role of mentors as teachers, sponsors and/or collaborators and mentees’ subsequent academic career success. Specifically, we find that mentees who perceive their mentors as sponsors who extend their social networks are most successful – in particular if they perceive their mentors also as teachers. Further, we find that collaborating with mentors who are not their academic advisors on joint research projects has negative implications for mentees’ subsequent career success.

KEYWORDS:

• Academia
• mentoring roles
• career success
• human capital
• social capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Agnes Bäker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2580-3278

Notes

1 A Habilitand works on his or her ‘Habilitation’, a degree similar to a second, advanced PhD that allows the researcher to teach independently.

2 Only very rarely, the positions of full professor (W-2 Professor or W-3 Professor, see e.g. Ooms, Werker, and Hopp 2018) are temporary contracts, i.e. not (yet) tenured.

3 The Handelsblatt ranking from 2011 for economists and 2009 for business administration is used.

4 For further robustness checks instead of year of birth time dummies were used for ten-year periods starting in the 1970s and taking the value ‘1’ if the respective researcher was awarded tenure in the respective period. The reference group is ‘researchers who were awarded tenure after 2000 and until 2010’. The results remain robust, apart from the collaborator variable losing significance in Model 2.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (program: ‘Wissenschaftsökonomie’, grant number: 01PW11008).