Role of mentoring programmes in enhancing mentees’ success: An empirical study of communication practices in a Malaysian public university

An ideal mentoring programme would highly encourage mentors and mentees to implement open and face-to-face communication in order to enhance the effectiveness and success of a learning process. Even though this correlation is important the role of communication as an important determinant in mentoring programmes has been relatively neglected in higher education student development models. This study was undertaken to examine the correlation between communication styles in mentoring program and mentees’ success. Primary data were gathered in a field survey where questionnaires were administered to 136 bachelor degree students at a research university in Peninsular Malaysia, The results of Smart Partial Least Squares (SmartPLS) path model analysis confirmed that the willingness of mentors to implement face-to- face and open communication in formal and informal mentoring programmes helped to enhance mentees’ psychosocial and self-efficacy. However, the readiness of mentors to practice open communication style in formal and informal mentoring programmes did not help to promote mentees’ psychosocial and self-efficacy in the research university studied. This dissonant finding may have been due to the variegated nature of the respondents’ social and personal backgrounds which led them to have different evaluations and judgements about the ability of mentors to implement the particular communication style in mentoring programmes.