Professional obligation or professional citizenship behaviour? : mentoring in the UK veterinary sector

Mentoring has received prominence as having the potential to address several of the key challenges currently faced by the UK veterinary profession and it has long played a central role in the educational architecture of the profession. By providing better support for young vets, as they transition from higher education into the workplace, and support for an increasingly diverse workforce, mentoring has gained credence as the answer to recruitment and retention difficulties and the prevailing mental health crisis. Yet mentoring practice remains inconsistent across the sector; it is broadly ad hoc and voluntary, with several mature mentoring schemes within larger organisations and an increasing number of mentoring arrangements organised by professional bodies. An overlooked dimension of mentoring is the underpinning force of professional obligation that compels mentors to engage in mentoring. The project presented here responds to calls for more focus on conceptual gaps in understanding mentoring by investigating this little explored facet of professional obligation in the UK veterinary sector, where mentoring has become critical to the profession. The study adopts a social constructivist case study design, underpinned by a qualitative, interpretivist paradigm. The case study brings together data captured through semi-structured interviews with four mentor scheme convenors; in-depth phenomenological interviews with ten vet mentors and documentary data, both from participating organisations and publicly available websites. The transcripts and documents were imported into NVivo and analysed thematically. The study contributes to understanding the veterinary profession and mentoring within it by providing first hand accounts of how the key themes explored in the veterinary literature impact professional lives and mentoring. Vet mentors are required to define their profession ahead of translating and diffusing it as Carrier Professionals. In doing so they weave together notions of institutional pillars with their professional obligations and the ongoing impacts of significant forces of change. This study elucidates how concepts of profession and professional obligation underpin the impetus to mentor and offers a form of professional citizenship behaviour, discretionary behaviour, felt as obligation to the profession, which drives the mentors to engage with mentoring.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2021

Author dc:creator

• Feehily, Mary Joanne

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gannon, Judie M.

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/kh2e-px09

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:838c9962-963e-4395-b4e8-ec865323e6ee:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1