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

Abstract

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.