Stop the hovering : The helicopter mentor, a new view on the dysfunctional mentor

Abstract

The concept of a helicopter mentor was introduced in the current study. A scale was developed to measure helicopter mentoring. To provide validity evidence for the helicopter mentoring measure, assessments of typical mentoring, dysfunctional mentoring, anxiety and self-esteem were used. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the 20-item four factor helicopter mentoring measure, looking at the following four subscales: Results suggested dropping problematic items, resulting in a 14-item four factor model, where six of the original 20 items were removed. All subscales had acceptable levels of internal reliability. As hypothesized, the helicopter mentoring measure was negatively correlated with the typical mentoring measure, and distinct from but related to dysfunctional mentoring. Helicopter mentoring was also not significantly correlated to anxiety, but was significantly correlated to self-esteem. These results suggest that helicopter mentoring is an important construct to examine in the workplace, and future research should continue to investigate helicopter mentoring.