How Does Mentoring Affect Protégés’ Adaptive Performance in the Workplace: Roles of Thriving at Work and Promotion Focus

Abstract

The question of how to improve employees' adaptive performance in dynamic environments has become a hot issue in organizational management. Although previous research has focused on the antecedents of adaptive performance, less attention has been paid to the impact of mentoring. Based on the conservation of resources theory and regulatory focus theory, this study examines the impact mechanism and boundary conditions of mentoring on protégés' adaptive performance. In addition, through an empirical analysis of 269 samples, this study finds that mentoring has a significant positive impact on protégés' adaptive performance. Thriving at work plays a full mediation role between mentoring and protégés' adaptive performance, and protégés' promotion focus moderates the relationship between mentoring and thriving at work such that the relationship is stronger among protégés with a higher promotion focus. Furthermore, the indirect relationship between mentoring and adaptive performance is stronger when protégés have a high level of promotion focus.

Can human resource flexibility disentangle innovative work behavior among hospitality employees? The roles of harmonious passion and regulatory foci

“…High in prevention focus, employees exhibit security and safety needs and connect their goals to routines, duties, risk mitigation and security, while promotion-focused individuals exhibit growth and developmental needs and frame their goals around aspirations and gains (Wallace et al , 2016). Research reported that employees with different regulatory foci tend to respond differently to the effects of management practices such as mentoring (Zeng et al , 2020), job control (Du et al , 2018) and supervisor knowledge sharing (Kim et al , 2021). It is, thus, tenable to postulate the interactive effect of regulatory foci with HR flexibility on employee harmonious passion.…”

Can Corporate Social Responsibility Promote Employees’ Taking Charge? The Mediating Role of Thriving at Work and the Moderating Role of Task Significance

“…As a kind of contextual resource and social support, enterprise actively undertaking CSR promotes employees’ taking charge via thriving at work. This positive relationship is also supported by Zeng et al (2020a) , who suggests mentoring as a resource that has a significant positive impact on protégés’ adaptive performance via thriving at work. Furthermore, findings confirm the importance of CSR and its boundary context to employees’ taking charge, which provides a very promising framework for studying CSR and taking charge behavior via thriving at work.…”

Positive Performance Feedback and Innovation Search: New Ideas for Sustainable Business Development

“…Although CEOs are actively involved in the strategic choices of their firms [16] and the trade-offs between risk-taking and conservatism, studies examining the impact of CEOs' regulatory focus on firms' strategic choices remain scarce, implying that the impact of CEO regulatory focus on strategy may be underestimated. The innovation search behavior studied in this work is divided into depth search and breadth search behavior, both of which require CEOs to trade-off between innovativeness and riskiness [17][18][19]. From this, we propose that CEO regulatory focus may influence firms' search behavior choices in the face of the same positive performance feedback.…”