An Examination of Personality on Mentoring and Coaching Relationships

Abstract

Mentoring and coaching programs have been shown to be effective in giving student teachers skills that transfer over to the workplace. Part of an effective mentoring or coaching relationship is the quality of the relationship between the mentor and the protégé. Previous research suggests that personality tends to predict the quality of a mentoring relationship; high openness, high conscientiousness, and low neuroticism tend to positively predict the reception of mentoring and coaching. The formation of a mentoring relationship may be established either face-to-face or via online communication. The research reported here examines the personality data of eleven participants in a hybrid face-to-face/online mentoring and coaching program for student teachers. Survey data measuring personality and relationship quality was collected. Given insufficient data or power to perform a statistical analysis, t-tests of mean differences were conducted to detect any existing trends between openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and relationship quality. Except for neuroticism, the findings lacked sufficient power to detect any trends.