Developing Attitudes Toward an Entrepreneurial Career Through Mentoring

Abstract

Mentoring is reputed to support the career choices and development of individuals in various contexts. This study is one of the few that investigates the effect of mentoring on career satisfaction and retention of novice entrepreneurs. We surveyed 360 novice entrepreneurs who had been supported by a mentor. Our analyses demonstrate the direct effect of mentoring on entrepreneurial self-efficacy, which mediates the relationship between satisfaction of being an entrepreneur and the intention of staying in the profession. Moreover, mentoring not only has an indirect effect on satisfaction; it seems to have a negative direct effect on intention. This result could possibly be due to the awareness of novices regarding the limitations of their initial business project. Given that entrepreneurs are closely tied to their business project, mentoring should come earlier in the entrepreneurial process in order to influence career satisfaction and retention of novice entrepreneur.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 100 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.