Susciter l’engagement des mentors bénévoles pour entrepreneurs : une question de sélection ou d’encadrement ?

Mentoring programs for entrepreneurs are based on volunteers that can quit their engagement at any time. Knowing the managerial costs of mentoring schemes and those of training mentors, it becomes imperative to study the mentor?s retention and their satisfaction with respect to their engagement. To investigate this problem, we carried out a survey with 366 mentors involved in the Réseau M (M Network) of Fondation de l?entrepreneurship (Quebec). Our results show that three out of six reasons that lead mentors to be engaged as volunteers have an influence on their satisfaction with their engagement and also on their retention: these have to do with understanding and learning, which match their own values, and enhance their self-esteem. It appears that investigating the reasons mentors engage could be an important tool in selecting those with high potential to remain active and to be the most satisfied within this kind of organization. However, managers of mentoring schemes should mainly consider activities that foster satisfaction toward the engagement in the local mentoring unit to retain their mentors.