Workplace mentoring in the legal profession.

• Author: Laband, David N.

1. Introduction

   The purpose of this article is to direct the attention of economists to the phenomenon of workplace mentoring. There are indications that the incidence of mentor-protege relationships in certain occupations and industries is as high as 75 percent or more. This fact notwithstanding, the economics literature generally (and labor economics literature specifically) is virtually silent with respect to mentoring. By way of introducing the subject matter to the profession, we focus attention on mentoring in the legal profession. We are able to provide lower-bound estimates of the incidence of mentoring among lawyers. We then propose and discuss two explanations of the practice. In brief, mentoring (generally) may serve to: (1) enhance the efficiency of job matching, and (2) reduce employee turnover and enhance worker investment in firm-specific human capital by bonding workers and firms more closely together. At this early stage, we are able to report some evidence in support of function (2).

   In a survey of top business executives, Roche [22] found that 63.5 percent of the 1,250 respondents had a mentor, defined as "a person who took a personal interest in your career and who guided or sponsored you." Nearly as many of these executives (61.6 percent) had served in a mentoring capacity themselves. America and Anderson [1] found that 53 percent of 1,050 female corporate officers surveyed reported having had a mentor/protege relationship. The evidence suggests that mentor-protege relationships are a common labor market phenomenon, at least in certain occupational classifications.

   Roche found that initial attachment to a mentor generally occurs during the first five years of an individual's career. However, since respondents who reported having such a relationship averaged 2 mentors, he noted considerable attachment to mentors during the proteges' 6th-10th years of career. Most respondents reported that their mentors exerted a substantial influence on their career. Those executives who had a mentor averaged 47.3 years in age and $118,900 in salary, whereas executives who did not have a mentor averaged 49.2 years in age and $114,200 in salary. Finally, Roche noted that 50 percent of executives who had a mentor reported being highly satisfied with their career progress, while only 40 percent of executives who had no mentor reported that level of career satisfaction.

   Table I. Mentoring in the Legal Profession - 1984

   Category Percent with Mentors

   Private Practice 38.36 Corporate Counsel 33.82 Federal Agency 40.54 State/Local Agency 31.11

   Solo Practice 13.56 2-3 Lawyers 30.94 4-9 Lawyers 39.52 10-20 Lawyers 55.80 21-30 Lawyers 38.46 31-60 Lawyers 51.25 61-90 Lawyers 57.78 90+ Lawyers 48.25

   Associates 57.04 Partners 28.60 Arguably, Roche's survey suffers from selectivity problems. Since the focus of his survey is on the mentor-protege relationship, the response rate may be weighted in favor of individuals who participated in such a relationship. However, even if we assume the extreme case that none of his (2,726) non-respondents ever had a mentor-protege relationship, his numbers imply a minimum rate of mentoring among executives of 20 percent.

   Our figures, derived from the American Bar Association's National Survey of Career Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction, conducted in 1984, reveal a high incidence of mentoring in the legal profession. The focus on general career satisfaction/dissatisfaction mitigates the selectivity problem inherent to Roche's survey. One specific question (out of many) posed was: "Do you have a mentor in your place of work who furthers your career and gives you advice?" Note that the question refers to the respondent currently being protege to a mentor, as opposed to a more encompassing question asking whether the respondent ever had such a relationship. The former undoubtedly understates the true incidence of mentoring. Still, the figures are illuminating.

   Roughly 35 percent of the lawyers who responded to the survey regarded themselves as proteges in this form of relationship. The supply of mentors in a solo practice is not very great; thus the low incidence. Well over half of all associates were proteges to mentors, as were over one quarter of the partners. These numbers suggest that Roche may not suffer much of a selectivity problem. With 35 percent of lawyers reporting currently being in a mentor-protege relationship, it is not difficult to imagine that 50-60 percent or more of all lawyers have participated in such a relationship at some point in their careers.

   The handful of empirical investigations of the impact of having a mentor on subsequent career success find that individuals who have had a mentor experience greater job satisfaction and earn more than unmentored individuals. However, all of the previously-reported findings with respect to returns to being mentored have been based on data collected either through surveys that ask about mentorship specifically (e.g., Roche [22]; Ochberg, Tischler, and Schulberg [18]), or retrospective interviews (Levinson, et al. [17]; Collins and Scott [3]; and Zey [26]). The former suffer from potential selectivity problems, the latter suffer from small samples.

   Yet numerous aspects of the mentor-protege relationship remain unexplored. Why, for example, would senior members of an organization ever agree to mentor junior members? Presumably, such mentoring absorbs time and other resources commanded by the mentor which have an opportunity cost. Why do mentored individuals experience greater career success than unmentored individuals? Is there something inherent to the relationship that makes the protege more productive or does mentoring merely identify those individuals who will be more successful anyway? Why would organizations encourage or discourage the practice of mentoring? These questions and others have simply never been addressed before, to our knowledge, in the economics literature.

2. Theories of the Mentoring Function

   Job Matching

   The M-P relationship is compatible with the theory of job matching (Jovanovic [8; 10]; Barron, Black, and Loewenstein [2]). In a world characterized by costly information about worker quality, firms may be willing to invest resources in identifying high quality employees (for our purposes, workers with high productive capacity). Similarly, would-be employees who have high productive capacity may be willing to invest resources in communicating to firms their high quality status. One means of satisfying both parties' job matching wishes is through the M-P relationship. The employee signals his quality through his willingness to bear the cost of "training" under a mentor; the firm invests the (unrecoverable) time of senior personnel in identifying high quality junior employees. Since matching mistakes are costly to the firm, the profit-maximizing firm will differentially reward efficient matchers. Any incentive to shirk on the part of mentors is mitigated by the reward structure (which we take to include possible adverse career consequences of systematically misjudging the abilities of their proteges).(1) A straightforward implication of the job-matching explanation is that mentored individuals will experience greater earnings and career success than non-mentored individuals. The facts, as reported by Roche for top corporate managers, are consistent with job-matching. The interpretation, however, is quite different. In the management literature mentoring creates more productive workers; in a job matching context more productive workers are identified by the mentoring process.

   Mentoring as job matching implies: (1) that individuals with relatively high productive capacity will seek out mentors and vice-versa, (2) that the productivity (and hence earnings) of proteges while they are being mentored will be higher than the productivity of unmentored workers, and (3) that earnings (and other observed measures of career success) of mentored individuals will exceed those of unmentored individuals. The higher earnings and greater career success of proteges noted by Roche is consistent with implication (3). However, the job-matching explanation is inconsistent with our observation that 25 percent of partners in law firms are proteges to mentors. We expect that matching would be a fait accompli by the time an individual is promoted to partner in a law firm. Moreover, if job matching was the sole function of the mentor-protege relationship, we would expect all new employees to be mentored. This does not occur.

   Firm-Specific Human Capital

   Mentoring also may be an efficient vehicle whereby firms encourage employees to develop firm-specific human capital (SHC). Employers prefer workers to develop SHC, because it bonds them to the firm, which implies less turnover than occurs among workers with general human capital (GHC). However, workers prefer to develop GHC because of its portability across firms. To induce workers to invest in SHC, firms typically pay some portion of the worker's acquisition cost. SHC binds workers to firms because of the VMP loss (reflected in lower wages) implied by switching employers and binds firms to workers because of the costliness of replacing capital. The inverse relationship between workforce turnover and specific human capital acquisition has been documented by Parsons [19], Pencavel [20] and Jovanovic [9].

   There is, however, a potentially nontrivial moral hazard problem with respect to the firm compensating the individual for his investment in SHC. If the worker's SHC is not fully transferable to another firm, his opportunity wage is something less than his current VMP. Reneging by the firm, in terms of not paying an individual the full value of his/her VMP or a slower-than-justified promotion schedule, is mitigated by the need to induce a continuous stream of workers to invest in SHC. The firm communicates its commitment to honor its payoff promises by permitting senior personnel...