Who Wants to Be a Mentor and Why? Factors and Motives That Drive Students’ Decision to Engage

The purpose of this paper was to identify characteristic features of students who volunteer as peer mentors in a formal mentoring program (Study 1) and explore motives that underlie their decision to engage (Study 2). In line with expectancy-value and conservation of resources theory we suggested that students would be more likely to engage as mentors if they were confident to achieve positive results and felt they had enough resources available to compensate potential costs. In Study 1 we tested this assumption by comparing 182 student mentors with a control group of 207 nonmentors on several personality and skill-related variables. We found that mentors displayed higher levels of agreeableness, self-efficacy, and transformational leadership skills than nonmentors and that transformational leadership skills acted as a partial mediator between dispositional factors and mentor engagement. In Study 2 we asked mentors why they would like to engage in a formal mentoring program and analyzed their written motivation statements. In line with previous research, student mentors stated both self- and other-focused motives. However, we found some specific differences related to the special case of formal peer mentoring in an academic setting.