روابط مشاوره غیررسمی و فرآیندهای شغلی حسابدار عمومی

Research has shown that informal mentoring relationships benefit the protégé, mentor and employing organisation. As such they have been of interest to public accounting firms. The functioning of these relationships in Big Eight/Big Five accounting firms has been investigated in the USA and more recently in Ireland. The career outcome of most interest has been turnover intentions. This paper reports the results of a questionnaire study of mentoring relationships in the Australian state of Queensland. The receipt of mentoring support by accountants is found to be associated with not only lower turnover intentions, but also higher job satisfaction, and lower intentions of female accountants to seek part-time employment. The impact of the organisational context in which these relationships are initiated and cultivated is also investigated. The size of the accounting firm and the national culture of the country in which the firm operates, appear to have some bearing on mentoring experiences.

Organisational researchers have subjected mentoring relationships to extensive investigation (e.g. Hunt and Michael, 1983, Kram, 1983 and Kram and Isabella, 1985), the results of which have been used to inform an emerging body of research into mentoring within public accounting firms. A significant proportion of this accounting research has focussed on the non-formal communication networks within firms and in particular, informal mentoring relationships formed on the initiative of the mentor and the protégé.1 In this context, a mentor is an individual who ‘helps the younger individual learn to navigate in the adult world and world of work…supports, guides, and counsels the young adult as he or she accomplishes this important task’ (Kram, 1985, p.2). Prior research on informal mentoring has been conducted using samples of public accountants drawn from US and Irish firms. There is no quantitative evidence on informal mentoring relationships within Australian public accounting firms. The first research objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the functions of informal mentoring relationships involving accountants of different gender who are drawn from all organisational levels within public accounting firms in the Australian state of Queensland. Two further extensions of mentoring research are provided by this study. First, informal mentoring studies have largely been limited to a Big Eight/Big Five accounting firm environment within the USA. The second research objective of the paper is to investigate the potential effect of organisational context on the initiation and cultivation of mentoring relationships. For the first time, mentoring relationships formed outside a Big Eight/Big Five firm environment are directly assessed. Also, one of the few non-US studies by Barker et al. (1999) in Ireland raised the possibility of cross-cultural differences in mentoring experiences. The possible impact of national culture on mentoring experiences is considered in this paper. Secondly, prior mentoring research has largely focussed on lower turnover intentions as a potential outcome of mentoring. The third research objective of this paper extends this knowledge by considering the impact of mentoring on accountants' satisfaction levels with aspects of their job. In addition, researchers have tended to use a dichotomous variable—‘intend to stay’, or ‘intend to leave’—to measure turnover intentions. This variable is investigated in this paper, as well the possible career manifestations of an intention to leave such as moving to part-time employment, or leaving the profession altogether. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 outlines evidence on the functioning of informal mentoring relationships in public accounting and the possible impact of national culture, and firm size. Section 3 considers the potential career outcomes from mentoring that are of interest in this paper—future career choices and job satisfaction. The research method is outlined in Section 4, the results and discussion of results are contained in 5 and 6, and concluding comments follow.

This paper has provided quantitative evidence on the informal mentoring networks public accounting firms from the Australian state of Queensland. The evidence serves to highlight their importance, since mentoring is associated with career outcomes such as lower intentions to leave, and higher satisfaction levels with aspects of the job including the quality of supervision, advice on promotion opportunities, interactions with colleagues and the job overall. Also, female accountants who on average indicated a greater intention to move to part-time employment than their male counterparts were less likely to do so if they had been mentored. This paper raises questions on how best to manage and to develop informal mentoring networks. Differences in national cultures provides a potential explanation of the relative importance of the career development, social support and role modelling mentoring functions across countries such as Australia, Ireland and the USA. A common Anglo-Celtic heritage may have contributed to similar mentoring experiences between Irish and Queensland public accountants. Additional research is needed to systematically investigate why public accountants of various nationalities report different types of interactions with their mentors. This knowledge would be useful to inform country-specific personnel policies for accounting firms to facilitate the development and functioning of mentoring relationships. The different work environments of small and large public accounting firms also appears to influence the initiation and cultivation of mentoring relationships. Accountants from small firms were less likely to have a mentor, and both career development and social support were an important part of their mentoring experiences. In contrast, only career development support was an important component of the mentoring experiences of accountants from large firms. Future research may examine what size-related characteristics facilitate or hinder the development and functioning of mentoring relationships. Potential factors include small firm barriers to mentoring on one hand, and the degree of stress and competition and the socialisation programs that characterise large firms on the other hand.