THE QUALITY OF MENTORING RELATIONSHIPS' IMPACT ON THE OCCUPATIONAL COMMITMENT OF NURSING FACULTY

There are dwindling numbers of nurses in the professoriate due to large numbers of faculty retiring and retiring at a younger age, burnout, and an increasing array of options available to them outside the professoriate. Mentoring initiatives have been suggested as a means to boost retention of nursing faculty. This quantitative, cross-sectional, correlational study utilized an Internet survey to examine whether the quality of mentoring relationships and the number of years of employment in the professoriate were related to occupational commitment among nursing faculty. A second purpose of this study was to examine whether having a mentor was related to nursing faculties' occupational commitment. Statistical support for the correlation between the sum score of the quality of a mentoring relationship and the sum score of nursing faculty's affective occupational commitment (r = .244, P = .018) was demonstrated. Mentoring initiatives may be a feasible option for decreasing attrition of nursing faculty.