Influence of Mentorship Practices on Employee Performance in Small Manufacturing Firms in Garissa County, Kenya

Abstract

Mentorship is a semi-structured approach where a person or groups of people share their knowledge, skills and experience to assist others to progress in their own lives and careers. This practice motivates employees and empowers others so as to identify their own strength and achieve organizational targets and goals. Mentorship enables the mentee to tap into the best of a mentor as a source of energy to foster intrapersonal and interpersonal understanding. These practices were identified as the independent variables, while employee performance was the dependent variable. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of mentorship practices on employees’ performance in small manufacturing firms in Garissa County. The specific objectives conceptualized from the study include; to establish how leadership mentorship affect employee performance; to assess how innovative mentorship influence employee performance; to determine how knowledge-transfer mentorship influence employee performance; and to examine how talent development mentorship affect employee performance in small manufacturing in Garissa county. A cross-sectional survey design was used in the study whereby the respondents were all the employees were included in the study. Questionnaires were administered to collect data. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to arrive at conclusions on the relationships between study variables. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the set hypotheses and construct the model of interest. The study established a significant relationship between leadership mentorship, innovative mentorship, knowledge transfer mentorship, talent development mentorship and the performance of the employees. The results of the study will contribute tremendously to better the management of firms through mentorship adoption practices. The study recommends that mentorship practices be considered as part of the organizations strategy to improve on the performance of the employees.

Keywords: Competitive advantage, Knowledge assets, Knowledge management, Knowledge transfer mentorship