Networking within an organization and having a mentor are widely thought to promote career success, but a new UGA study finds that African-American men don’t receive the same measurable benefits from these professional connections that Caucasians do.
Study co-author Lillian Eby, a professor in the Industrial-Organizer Psychology Program, said the finding shouldn’t discourage African Americans from seeking mentoring and networking opportunities. Rather, it emphasizes the need for women and minorities to think broadly about the mentors they choose and with whom they network. People tend to have professional and social networks that are composed of people who are similar to them, she explained, and African Americans remain underrepresented in high-level positions.
“If African-American men are picking mentors who are like them, then they’re more likely to be networking with people who have less power and influence within an organization,” Eby said, “which may be why mentoring is not predicting career success for them.”
The study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, examined data from nearly 250 college-educated, African-American men to determine which factors were most closely related to their career success. Co-author C. Douglas Johnson, an associate professor of management at Georgia Gwinnett College, said the intent was to see if conclusions from previous studies with Caucasians held true for African Americans.
Unlike mentoring and networking, universal predictors of success were level of education, training and willingness to move for new opportunities.
