Workplace Mentoring and the Interdisciplinary Inadequacy of Public Administration Scholarship

As a field with links to a variety of social sciences, including management and psychology, public administration has been criticized for the extent to which it “has distanced itself from the disciplines on which it depends... [ view full abstract ]

As a field with links to a variety of social sciences, including management and psychology, public administration has been criticized for the extent to which it “has distanced itself from the disciplines on which it depends for intellectual vitality and renewal . . . [and] has become an ‘interdisciplinary silo’” (Perry, 2016, p. 212). One such example of this epistemological isolation can be seen in the literature on workplace mentoring; the data that inform collective knowledge on the phenomenon are almost exclusively drawn from private, for-profit sources, and research is primarily published in management and psychology—rather than public administration—journals. While public administration mentoring scholarship may be informed by research produced within the management or psychology domains, it is at the same time failing to impactfully contribute to the literature. In this paper, I examine the extent of disciplinary isolation in mentoring research by examining citation data for the 432 workplace mentoring articles published in the top 50 management, applied psychology, and public administration journals between 1977 and 2017. I likewise review several key methodological aspects of the mentoring studies published specifically in public administration journals during that time in order to outline potential strengths, weaknesses, and areas of convergence or divergence with the larger body of scholarship. I conclude with a discussion of implications and proposed future research opportunities.