Why mentoring does not always reduce turnover: The intervening roles of value congruence, organizational knowledge and supervisory satisfaction

The accounting literature has long analyzed whether and how mentoring relationships affect public accountants' turnover intentions. To continue the study of that question, we examine the mediating effect of value congruence and organizational knowledge. Analyzing data from mentored accountants, we find that two aspects of mentoring (career development and role modeling) are positively associated with higher levels of perceived person-organization value congruence. Social interaction, a third aspect of mentoring, was negatively associated with the measure of value congruence. Mentoring's career development aspect is associated with building protégé implicit knowledge of the organization, but proves unrelated to turnover intentions. Value congruence is found to associate with higher levels of supervisory satisfaction, which, in turn, strongly associates with decreased turnover intentions. Therefore, the dimensions of mentoring have a selective effect on valuable organizational outcomes which are dependent upon other psychological and behavioral contingencies.