Short-Term Impact of Faculty Mentor Development on Mentees' Scholarly Productivity.

Abstract

Mentoring and mentor development, while interconnected, serve distinct purposes within the academic community. Although the effects of mentoring programs for mentees are well-documented, the impact of mentor development programs on mentee outcomes is less explored. This study investigates the effect of a faculty mentor development program on mentee scholarly productivity. The study was a randomized controlled trial involving four academic and health science institutions in the United States Southwest and Mountain West regions. This study included 94 mentees randomly assigned to the intervention or control arm. The intervention group comprised 56 mentees whose mentors participated in a comprehensive development program featuring combined virtual synchronous plus online asynchronous components. The control group, consisting of 38 mentees, had mentors who only engaged in the online asynchronous component. Mentee outcomes, extracted from curriculum vitaes, included the count of publications, presentations, and grants over the prior year, assessed at baseline, and 12- and 24-months following randomization. The primary outcome was total scholarly productivity, calculated as the sum of these three counts. Our analysis, which accounted for repeated measures, revealed no significant differences in total scholarly productivity between the intervention and control groups at 12- and 24-month intervals. These findings suggest that mentor development programs do not significantly enhance mentee scholarly productivity in the short term. Such programs may require more than 24 months to show effectiveness in improving mentee scholarly outcomes or may require studying alternative career or psychosocial outcomes. Therefore, mentor development programs may not be optimal for achieving immediate gains in mentees' scholarly output and may need to be complemented with mentee professional development programs targeting scholarly outcomes.