Mentor-Mentee Interaction and Mentees’ Psychosocial Development: The Mediating Effect of Mentees’ Self-Efficacy

Article History: Purpose: Mentoring is an attractive extracurricular, partnership, and/or cooperative learning incorporated in higher learning institutions' curriculums. Extant studies circulated in the 21st century reveal that good interaction between mentors (i.e. lecturers) and mentees (i.e. students) will tremendously raise mentees’ self-efficacy. This situation may lead to the enhanced psychosocial development of mentees’. Even though this relationship has extensively been evaluated, the role of mentees’ self-efficacy as an essential mediating variable is rarely explained in the higher learning mentoring research literature. Thus, this research aimed to evaluate the relationship between mentormentee interaction, mentees’ self-efficacy, and psychosocial development. Research Methods: This study used a survey method to gather 679 usable questionnaires from undergraduate students at public institutions of higher learning in Sarawak, Malaysia. Findings: The SmartPLS path analysis model results indicate that mentees’ self-efficacy mediates the relationship between mentor-mentee interaction and mentees’ psychosocial development. Received: 28 July 2020 Received in revised form: 6 Dec. 2020 Accepted: 3 Jan. 2021 DOI: 10.14689/ejer.2021.94.4