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Although studies have improved understanding of the relation between external career mentoring and mentor work outcomes, an important question remains regarding whether this mentoring function influences mentor turnover intentions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of career mentoring outside the workplace on mentor turnover intentions.

Data were collected from 101 working business professionals in the southeastern USA at two points in time who provided career mentoring to business student protégés in an eight-month university sponsored mentoring program.

As hypothesized, moderated mediation analysis indicated that amount of external career mentoring negatively related to mentor turnover intentions and that the indirect effect of external career mentoring on mentor turnover intentions via mentor work engagement was stronger when both mentor protégé satisfaction and meeting frequency were high vs low. A two-way interaction revealed that mentors reporting higher protégé satisfaction had lower turnover intentions when meeting frequency was high vs low.

The findings help clarify the external career mentoring and mentor turnover intentions relation and have valuable theoretical implications for research on the benefits external mentoring can provide mentors. They also have practical implications for using external mentoring to enhance mentor work engagement and reduce mentor turnover intentions.

The paper aims to clarify a debate about the legitimacy of entrepreneurship as a field of study. Katz and Kuratko continued this discussion by evaluating the legitimacy as an academic discipline. Their work extends the earlier contributions of Stephenson, Meyer, Finkle et al., and Fiet. Their research focused on the use of secondary data to consider this research question. This study uses an empirical evaluation of the actors that form the basis of this field of study, the faculty that teach entrepreneurship.

This study used an online survey to ascertain the academic background, dissertation subject, doctoral course work, teaching assignments, and research output of individuals that described themselves as entrepreneurship faculty.

The results show that a significant percentage of the sample of college instructors did not have a doctorate in entrepreneurship, nor did they study entrepreneurship in their curriculum thereby potentially undermining perceptions of legitimacy.

This study was based upon feedback from 112 faculty. A test using a χ2 goodness-of-fit showed there was no significant difference between the geographic location of respondents to non-respondents. The findings paint a distressing picture of the academic qualifications of the faculty assigned to teach entrepreneurship. In addition, the results were disappointing for the research productivity of faculty in the field. The fact that so many of them view themselves as entrepreneurship and small business faculty reinforces the significance of the findings. In general, the authors find empirical evidence in the sample that entrepreneurship and small business may not be viewed as a legitimate field due to the lack of academic credentials and the extensive professional credentials of their instructors.

The findings demonstrate that entrepreneurship is likely not considered legitimate, in part, due to a lack of academic preparation or research productivity of instructors within the field of entrepreneurship. The lack of doctoral preparation is a critical problem. This issue would not be paramount where faculty publishing solely in the field. However, the findings demonstrate self-described entrepreneurship instructors publish in other fields of study. Thus, the fact that faculty do not solely teach in the field is also testimony to the challenges of legitimacy faced by individuals that teach entrepreneurship.

The authors are not aware of any studies that specifically evaluate the academic background, dissertation subject, doctoral course work, teaching assignments, and research output of individuals that teach entrepreneurship.