Purpose: Mentoring is defined as a supporting behavior whereby a knowledgeable and experienced person (mentor) supports an inexperienced person (mentee) in order to develop his/her career and psychosocial aspects. Empirical studies on mentoring in the U.S. and Europe have shown that a high level of mentoring support is associated with greater career success among mentored individuals, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, better mental health as well as work life conflict. We translated a 9-item version of Mentoring Functions Questionnaire (MFQ-9, Castro et al. 2004), one of the most frequently used mentoring measures, and examined the internal consistency, reliability, and factor-based and concurrent validities of this measure.
Method: In January 2012, we conducted a web survey of internet survey monitors working as employees of private companies and analyzed the data of 357 respondents without missing answers. The questionnaire included the Japanese MFQ-9, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment as well as demographic variables.
Results: Cronbach alpha coefficients of MFQ-9 and its three subscales were all above 0.7 (0.75-0.77). The hypothesized three factors (career support, psychosocial support, and role modeling) were extracted by factor analysis. In the confirmatory factor analysis, assuming that there were three factors, fit indices were 0.96, 0.94, 0.97, and 0.05 for GFI, AGFI, CFI, and RMSEA respectively. Concurrent validity was supported by expected correlations of MFQ-9 with job satisfaction (r=0.20, p<0.01) and organizational commitment (r=0.17, p<0.01). As for subscales, career support and role modeling correlated with job satisfaction (r=0.14 and 0.15, respectively; both p<0.01) and commitment (r=0.17 and 0.14, respectively; both p<0.01), while psychosocial support was correlated only with job satisfaction (r=0.14, p<0.01).
Conclusions: While issues such as the relationship between psychosocial support with organizational commitment will be a topic for further research, this study has shown that the Japanese version of MFQ-9 has an acceptable level of reliability and validity.