The Relationship between Mentoring and Career Development of Higher Education Faculty Members.
The recent growth of Jordanian higher education institutions has been dramatic, both in number and size of the institutions and in the complexity of their function. The growth has brought with it problems of increasing concerns to the higher administrators and faculty. The faculty are been recognized as valuable resource, and successful educational institutions are working to maximize their existing human resource. In the present study, the roles of career motivation and career self-efficacy as explanatory factors were examined. Career motivation mediated the relationship between career mentoring and performance effectiveness. The last few years ,the concept of the "mentor" Mentoring has been the relationship of choice for professional development in education sectors for many years. A mentoring relationship involves a more experienced professional serving as a supportive and guiding role model for another professional who is less experienced in the field. Mentoring has also become a focus in the educational sphere. Graduate students are encouraged to seek out a mentor. The corporate world has been bombarded with literature emphasizing the value of people. Popular books by Peters and Waterman (1982), Kanter (1983), Naisbitt (1982). and Naisbitt & Aburdene (1985) stress the importance of human resource development to organizational success. The renewed interest in capitalizing on human resources has not escaped the academic world. Baldwin and Blackburn (1983) emphasized that the effectiveness of a college or university is directly linked to the quality and vigor of its faculty members. Today's conditions of limited resources and ever-increasing demand for accountability have made the optimum performance of a faculty a top priority in higher education. Faculty career development is recognized as an important factor in maintaining faculty vitality (Hynes, 1984; Ruch, 1984; Braskamp et al., 1982; Baldwin and Blackbum, 1983). Career development and advancement are believed to be influenced by a variety of personal characteristics; however, evidence suggests that environmental and organizational factors also play a significant part in the academic career development process (Fowler, 1982). One such factor is that of mentoring. "Today one can find mention of mentoring in almost every publication aimed at management, administrators, educators, human resource professionals, and the general public" (Murray, 1991. p. xiii); however, its role in career development has received only limited study. Examples of successful mentoring models are found more frequently in business than in education. In higher education systems throughout the world, the need for diversity and differentiation is recognized. The emergence of new professions, the expanded demands of the labor market, the extended social base from which higher education institutions draw their students, and the development of new disciplines and fields of study, are all drivers of greater diversity. Nonetheless, in many systems the kind of institutional stratification that saw institutions distinguished from each other by clear mission differentiation often determined by the state, has largely been superseded by new forms of differentiation driven by different mechanisms (Scott, 2006. Mentoring is a developmental relationship between a younger, less experienced individual and an older, more experienced person. (Ragins and Kram,2007). Statement of problem and questions The study sets out to examine the extent to which the career development of university education faculty has been influenced by mentors to assure quality higher education production at the University of Jordan, as perceived by the faculty, and to examine the study by answering the following questions: 1. To what extent to which the professional career development of educational faculty had been influenced by mentors? 2. …