Corporate Mentorship Programs for Neurodivergent Employees

Abstract

While many organisations are beginning to see neurodiversity as a talent in the workplace, autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, dyspraxia and sufferers of Tourette syndrome still have a lack of clarity in their organisation and receive inconsistent support and/or psychological safety. Existing evidence has focused on mentorship in the educational and early career transition space and not specifically in terms of sustained employment in the corporate world. To investigate whether the design, implementation and experience quality of corporate mentoring programs were related to job satisfaction, perceived belonging, career development perception, retention intention, self-reported performance and burnout, and whether psychological safety was a mediator in these relationships, this study employed a cross sectional survey of 200 neurodivergent employees recruited from five strata of neurodiversity through stratified random sampling. All three program quality constructs were below acceptable levels (α = -.26 to .09) and there was no significant relationship between program quality and any outcome variable in bivariate correlations or multiple regression analyses (all p > .08). There were no significant indirect effects via psychological safety, as determined by bootstrapped mediation analyses. No significant differences were found among the outcomes across mentor type (1-way ANOVA); however, there were significant differences among the outcomes across communication mode with the feeling of belonging being higher for virtual mentoring than for hybrid mentoring (p = .004). The results here indicate that the design of the program itself may not be enough to alter the workplace experience of neurodivergent workers, and that the format in which the communication is delivered and the workplace culture more broadly should be considered more important than the program design, when taken alone.