Decades of research has demonstrated how junior employees benefit from beingmentored(指导). Guidance from senior colleagues has also been shown to enhance mentees' job performance and satisfaction.
We were especially interested in understanding how mentoring might help mentors who work in stressful occupations. Mental health is a growing concern within occupations that play important social roles, such as medical professionals, firefighters, and police officers. And because policing is one of the most stressful occupations, with high levels of mental health and well-being difficulties, we conducted a study of a formal mentoring program in an English police force.
It was designed to support the development of junior officers by giving them a way to discuss concerns and receive guidance. Our study involved two parts. First, we conducted a field experiment: we compared the mental health of 17 mentor-mentee pairs to a control group of 18 pairs of senior and junior officers that did not participate in the program. Second, we interviewed both the mentees and their mentors separately.
Our experiment results showed that people who served as mentors experienced lower levels of anxiety, and described their job as more meaningful, than those who did not mentor. We learned from our interviews that mentoring afforded senior officers, as well as junior officers, a chance to discuss and reflect on concerns. By acknowledging that these anxieties were common, both mentees and mentors grew more comfortable in discussing them and in sharing different coping mechanisms.
Why does mentoring have this impact on mentors? Despite the pressures that comes with their roles — including abuse, difficult decision making, and the risk of death — police officers tend not to seek support from other officers, including more senior colleagues. This is to avoid negative stigma, a shameful reputation, associated with mental health disorders. Mentoring thereby offered a way to build trust within a relationship that laid a foundation for open and honest communication of sensitive topics.
A. We believe it offers a way to receive support that is often lacking.
B. The mentoring program was launched in 2013 in one of the police forces in England and Wales.
C. Formal mentoring programs provide an opportunity to encourage the discussion of difficult and sensitive topics.
D. However, what we are wondering is why mentoring has such great impact on mentors as well as mentees.
E. Mentors heard their mentees' accounts of anxiety and realized these feelings — which they also shared — were common.
F. We know far less, however, about how mentoring might benefit mentors themselves.
