Charleen Case

Why do mentors—more experienced and typically higher-status individuals—invest substantial time, effort, and resources in developing and protecting lower-status protégés? Existing accounts of mentorship typically focus on the characteristics and motives of people who choose to mentor. In this talk, I shift attention from who mentors are to the role they occupy. Integrating role theory with research on evolved social motives, I propose that occupying the mentor role can activate the parental care motivational system: a psychological system designed to motivate nurturance and protection toward dependent others. Mentoring and parenting share several functional features, including asymmetric responsibility for another person’s development, guidance, long-term investment, nurturance, and protection. Across a field survey of organizational mentors and three experiments, we find that the mentor role engages parental care motives and a more parental orientation toward protégés. These motives, in turn, predict greater career and psychosocial support, as well as nurturing and protective workplace investments. The findings offer an evolutionarily grounded, role-based account of investment in cross-hierarchy relationships and show how contemporary organizational roles can recruit motivational systems associated with more foundational social relationships.