ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1559060
Mentors' Resources and Premature Match Closure in Challenging Contexts: Testing a Model of Mediating Processes in an Online and a School-Based Mentoring Program
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
- 2University of Erlangen Nuremberg, Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This research aimed to investigate the impact of mentors' resources on the premature termination of mentoring relationships in challenging contexts as well as mediating psychological processes. In two studies, we analyzed the data of 98 mentors from an online mentoring program for girls in STEM subjects and the data of 60 mentors from a school-based talent mentoring program with talented youth. Participants were surveyed with a standardized questionnaire about their mentoring experiences during the first peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, which created a challenging context. The results indicated that a reduction of mentoring resources is associated with an increased risk of premature match closure. This effect of resources was mediated in two ways: by (a) mentors' confidence in their mentoring abilities, which predicted feelings of helplessness, and (b) mentors' beliefs in the modifiability of deficits and the stability of abilities, which predicted adaptive responses to failure. Furthermore, mentors in the school-based program reported a more significant reduction in mentoring resources, which, in turn, was more strongly associated with premature match closure than in the online mentoring program. This suggests that online mentoring might be more robust than face-to-face mentoring under unfavorable environmental conditions. Overall, our study points to equipping mentors with adequate resources and offering ongoing support, especially in challenging environments.
Keywords: mentoring, premature match closure, Online mentoring, helplessness, confidence in own ability, beliefs, COVID-19
Received: 11 Jan 2025; Accepted: 11 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bayer, Stoeger and Ziegler. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sonja Bayer, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.