Previous theories elicit three different roles for an academic mentor. First, he or she may act as a sponsor, that is, a provider of social networks enhancing the mentee’s visibility in the scientific community. Second, a mentor may act as a teacher, supplying the necessary skills and knowledge required by academic work. Finally, this activity may involve research cooperation, in which case an academic mentor functions as a collaborator. Leaning on this division, and focusing on academic mentorship that occurs after PhD graduation, this study tries to examine what role (as perceived by mentees) ends up being more important in shortening the path to full professorship.
The empirical analysis exploited a database monitoring all researchers in business and economics in universities in Germany, Austria and the German part of Switzerland. A survey was sent to those registered in this archive in order to find out if they had an additional mentor during their academic life after the attainment of their PhD degrees and before their reaching a tenured position (in German speaking academia this position is only reached with full professorship). Those whose answer was positive were then inquired about the main role such mentor exerted: sponsor, teacher or collaborator. The database was exploited further in order to determine the dependent variable of the study: how many years did the participants needed to obtain their full professorship. Furthermore, control variables like gender, age, international mobility, and whether they had children or not were also gathered from the database. Using hazard regressions, the authors conclude that those researchers whose academic mentor was viewed as a sponsor tend to present shorter times to tenure. This time seemed to decrease even further if at the same time a role as teacher was also attributed to the mentor. Contrarily, when mentors were perceived as collaborators, the time to tenure seemed to increase.
Comment: The conclusions of this study, although interesting, deserve additional confirmation from future studies. A sample of only 80 observations and a methodology that does not address self-selection effects, are two powerful reasons for caution. In particular, those mentees who, ex-ante, have less capability for independent research may seek mentors for collaboration. The causality in this case would be reversed. Thus, statements of the caliber “academic mentoring programs … might explicitly advise mentees and mentors alike that the program does not focus on collaboration” are probably premature.
Text: Iñaki Rodríguez Longarela, Stockholm Business School
