Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

Abstract

Although women have comprised the majority of accounting graduates in the United States since the mid 1980s, they are underrepresented in the accounting professoriate. Therefore, studies that add to an understanding of the factors that contribute to retaining those in the profession are valuable. Studies have been conducted to understand ways to support female faculty members, with mentoring in particular being one of those factors. However, there is a lack of scholarly work on mentoring female accounting faculty members and an absence of any research that seeks to empirically link aspects of mentoring with work engagement. Hence, the purpose of this study was to explore the effect of mentoring satisfaction on work engagement for pretenured and tenured female accounting faculty. This study surveyed female accounting faculty members in the United States using the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-9) to measure work engagement and the Mentor Role Instrument (MRI), developed by Ragins and McFarlin (1990), to measure satisfaction with the mentoring experience. The results indicated that the variables of interest, namely having been mentored and satisfaction with the mentoring experience were significant factors in predicting the level of work engagement and made significant contributions to the models, beyond the demographic variables included. Although the level of overall satisfaction with the mentoring experience was found to be significant, satisfaction with two particular aspects of mentoring experience were also found to be statistically significant, collegiality and promotion and tenure assistance. Also, two demographic variables, age and years in the profession, were significant and provided contradictory influence on the model. Specifically, older individuals reported higher work engagement, but the more years in the profession, the lower the level of work engagement reported. These findings support previous findings on the role of mentoring. In addition, they provide support for continued research to explore additional factors that contribute to work engagement for female accounting faculty members. Higher Education officials may utilize the knowledge provided by this study to improve policies and practices within the profession as well as those in professional associations.

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