Ethics-Related Mentoring and Protégé Moral Motivation and Ethical Leadership

We extend the mentoring and ethical leadership literatures by exploring the nature and importance of ethics-related mentoring, its effective measurement, and its potential role in promoting protégé moral motivation and ethical leadership. In study 1, qualitative interviews with 25 mentoring experts explored the concept of ethics- related mentoring and its potential importance in the mentor-protégé relationship. These interviews also generated items for a new measure of ethics-related mentoring. In study 2, we surveyed a sample of 114 working protégés in Germany, and exploratory factor analysis reduced these items and provided an initial factor structure for our measure. In study 3, a time-lagged Qualtrics survey of 152 protégés was used to further validate this measure and, drawing on social cognitive theory, test hypotheses where protégé perceptions of their mentor’s ethics-related mentoring is positively related to their own moral motivation and ethical leadership, and that these relationships are stronger when they have a prototypical mentor. Across the three studies, we confirm the importance of ethics-related mentoring and develop a new ethics related mentoring measure. We also provide excellent support for our hypothesised model, confirming a significantly stronger positive relationship between protégé perceptions of their mentors’ ethics-related mentoring and their own moral motivation and ethical leadership when they perceive their mentor is prototypical.