The Association of Temperament and Character of Mentors/Mentees with Satisfying Formal Mentoring of First-Year Medical Students

Background There are limited data regarding personality matching of mentors and mentees in medical academic settings. Objectives The current study aimed at investigating the relationships between satisfaction of 1st-year medical students with the mentoring program and the mentor/mentee characteristics of temperament and character. Methods In this prospective study, 99 first-year medical students (59.6% female) were enrolled as a part of formal university mentoring program during the 2012 - 2013 academic year. The mentees and mentors were gender-matched. Participation in the program and the study was voluntarily. Results Overall, by employing the temperament and character inventory it was possible to correctly predict the satisfaction of a mentoring relationship within the range 65% to 84% through linear, logistic, and non-linear models. Mentees’ cooperativeness and mentors’ novelty-seeking were the significant predictors of total satisfaction scores (R² = 0.131; P < 0.05). With an excellent prediction accuracy (Pseudo R² = 0.648, P < 0.05); the higher scores of mentors’ novelty-seeking, mentees’ self-directedness and self-transcendence were the significant predictors of the highest quartile of satisfaction. In contrast, higher scores of mentors’ harm avoidance predicted the lowest quartile of satisfaction. Non-similar harm avoidance, higher novelty-seeking of mentors than mentees, and higher self-transcendence scores of mentees than mentors were significant predictors of mentees’ satisfaction. Conclusions The current study results revealed that personality dissimilarities between mentors and mentees considerably influenced the satisfaction of mentees, which should be confirmed in prospective interventional studies.