Mentoring in family businesses: Toward an understanding of commitment outcomes

Drawing from the mentoring and organizational commitment literatures, this paper addresses the relationship between mentoring and organizational commitment within the family business context. While there is a clear connection between mentoring and organizational commitment in the broader literature, the relationship takes on added complexity in family businesses. In this paper, we develop arguments and offer propositions suggesting that mentoring in family firms results in different commitment outcomes depending on the familial status of the members in the mentoring dyad. While mentoring is most often linked to affective commitment, our propositions extend theory by suggesting that the unique mentoring relationships present in family firms can foster normative and continuance commitment in many circumstances. Propositions regarding mentoring and the various facets of organizational commitment are presented. Implications for theory and human resource management are also discussed.