Xiaoyu Wang, Xiaotong(Janey) Zheng, Yanjun Guan, Shuming Zhao

Journal of Occupational & Organizational Psychology. 2022，95(2): 332-357

Recommend Reason

At workplace, employees tend to focus on improving their performance and task competence and believe that high performance can help them receive more resources to develop their career. It has also been acknowledged that supervisors are more likely to provide career mentoring to high-performing employees and expect greater returns from their investment in mentoring. Although the extant literature generally supports the positive relationship between employee performance and SCM (supervisory career mentoring), this is not always the case. It has been found that high performers are likely to be envied and undermined by their supervisors. In addition, they can even be perceived by their supervisors as troublemakers because they often fail to manage their relationships with other team members. Therefore, in the eyes of supervisors, mentoring high performers may bring them and their teams potential risks and costs, which may prevent them from offering such employees SCM. Therefore, there are still unresolved issues in investigating the relationship between employee performance and SCM.

About the Author

Xiaoyu Wang, School of Economics and Management, Tongji University

Xiaotong (Janey) Zheng, Durham University Business School, Durham University

Yanjun Guan, Durham University Business School, Durham University. School of Humanities and Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong(Shenzhen)

Shuming Zhao, School of Business, Nanjing University

Keywords

Supervisory career mentoring, Task performance, Perspective-taking, Cost-benefit analysis, Social exchange

Brief Introduction

In this paper, we attempt to consider the role of relational competence (e.g., perspective-taking) in helping high-performing employees attract more SCM. We argue that perspective-taking as a fundamental aspect of relational competence, which is defined as ‘the process of imagining the world from another’s vantage point or imagining oneself in another’s shoes’, is as valuable as work performance in supervisor’s eyes. More importantly, it can greatly complement employees’ work performance and mitigate potential supervisory mentors’ concerns about mentoring high-performing subordinates. Findings from a multi-source multi-time survey (Study 1) and an online experiment (Study 2) consistently show that high performers with high perspective-taking will maximize their supervisor’s expected benefits from SCM and achieve a win-win situation between supervisors and high-performing subordinates.