RETHINKING MENTORSHIP AND ORGANISATIONAL COMMITMENT IN NIGERIAN ACADEMIA

The paper aims to elucidate the relationship between mentoring dimensions and organizational commitment of academic staff in Nigerian private universities. It proposes that effective mentorship aids employee retention by enhancing organizational commitment. Using the responses of 315 academic staff and in-depth interviews of professors and junior lecturers of six selected private universities in South-West Nigeria, this study added to literature by exploring mentoring as an emerging leadership development program and its concomitant relationship with organisational commitment for human capacity building in Nigerian universities. The paper
opted for a cross-sectional survey research design and using the open-ended approach of grounded theory, including 12 in-depth interviews with academic staff representing professors as mentors and junior lecturers as mentees having experienced either formal or informal mentoring. The paper provides empirical insights and results revealed that mentoring dimensions had a significant weak positive relationship with employee’s organizational commitment (r=0.121, 0.150, 0.159, 0.188, 0.203, p< 0.05, N=315). The qualitative findings
indicated that mentoring to a large extent positively affects employees’ organizational commitment. The paper includes implications for the development of effective mentoring programs and that every university should put in place structures that would support mentoring and align it with faculty’s knowledge development and promotion.