Mentoring faculty: impact, dyads vs. groups, and gender

ABSTRACT

Through a quantitative analysis using a cross-sectional survey design, we compared two faculty mentoring programmes (individual and group) that have run for more than 10 years at the Centre for Academic Leadership at the University of Ottawa. We did so to share the lessons with other higher education institutions that are looking at initiating or improving support for faculty members. The impact of mentoring, gathered through programme evaluation questionnaires was found to be largely positive: 93% of the 170 respondents were satisfied with their mentoring experience, and 97% agreed that they would recommend mentoring to their colleagues. Our analysis showed that group mentoring was more effective than one-on-one mentoring, and that women faculty members were not as satisfied with mentoring as their male colleagues.

KEYWORDS:

• Mentoring
• Faculty
• Impact
• Group mentoring
• Gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We have excluded the questionnaires returned from the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 participants as the virtual mentoring experience was significantly different during the pandemic.

² We were not able to compute the logit confidence interval for Q33 as all males agreed or strongly agreed with the statement resulting in an empty cell. When there are empty cells, the estimation with the logit model is highly unprecise. A solution that reduces the variance but slightly increases the bias is to add one observation in each of the empty cells.

³ These tables include the label of the statement, the observed value of the test statistic (LR), the number of degrees of freedom (df), the p-value, the number of participants with non-missing values in total (n), and in each group, and the proportions of participants that agree or strongly in agree in each group. As an example, there are significant difference between the two interventions in Table 3 (programme) in terms of Q19 (X²(1) = 6.63; p =.010).

⁴ Although slightly lower than the 75% practical significance threshold selected for this analysis, it is worth noting that 70% of respondents overall agree that mentoring helped them with their stress level (Q50).

⁵ The detailed statistics for statements which show a significant difference (p < 0.05) between genders can be found in Table 4.

⁶ See Table 2 for the statistical details of practically important proportions.

⁷ We refer the reader to Table 5 for the detailed statistics for statements that show a significant difference according to the programmes in which the women participated.

⁸ Since March 2020 (COVID−19), we have switched to online meetings, and although not the same as in-person meetings (which are typically scheduled over lunch to facilitate the conversation over shared food), these are still very much appreciated by faculty members and continue to provide an opportunity to connect with peers in these strange times and to build a community (Beane-Katner, 2014). As an example, a participant provided unsolicited feedback: ‘This mentoring group has been one of my favourite parts of my job here thus far, so thank you!’ (2020–2021 mentoring group participant).