Gender Difference in Developmental Relationships Offered in Work Organizations.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to scrutinize the gender difference in developmental relationships offered in work organizations. The issue was explored based on the concept of mentoring, which is a kind of voluntary support from the seniors to the juniors including career-related and psychosocial help. A questionnaire survey was conducted to 553 male and 150 female employees under 39 years of age that were working for a computer software company. The respondents were asked to answer how much mentoring was offered from their seniors by checking 24 items Received Mentoring Scale (RMS). In order to clarify the effect of the gender difference, the matched data procedure was adopted. Namely 50 male-female pairs of data were selected, which were controlled by age, the length of service, and educational background.

The results of t-test revealed the following facts: (1) In general, female employees receive less amount of mentoring than male employees do. (2) Female employees who have high educational backgrounds tend to receive almost the same amount of mentoring as the male employees do. (3) It is difficult for female employees to receive the same kind of mentoring from the male mentors even if they have high educational backgrounds. (4) Female employees who have low educational backgrounds tend to receive almost the same amount of psychosocial support as the male and highly educated female employees do, but they tend to receive significantly less amount of career-related support compared with the counterparts.

A discussion was addressed to the inequality of developmental relationships offered in work organizations and future research on the gender difference of the relationships.