Being a mentor, a manager, or both? Exploring the construction of professional identities in business meetings in a Hong Kong workplace

Abstract

This paper provides an in-depth case-study of some of the processes through which a CEO constructs his professional identity by negotiating the different demands of ‘managing’ and ‘mentoring’ his subordinates. Managers often play different roles at different times, and according to the mentoring literature, effective managers should mentor their subordinates. However, the processes of managing and mentoring are quite distinct: While managing primarily aims at advancing the development of the organisation, mentoring focuses on the enhancement of the addressee’s competence and effectiveness in his/her professional role. Given these differences, this paper explores how these practices and the different identities they index are enacted by the CEO of a small family business when interacting with his subordinates. The paper draws on 14 hours of video- and audio-recordings of authentic business meetings collected from a small company in Hong Kong, complemented by follow-up interviews, ethnographic information and workplace observations. In the company under examination, the CEO puts great emphasis on advancing his employees’ competence and is frequently engaged in mentoring. By employing conversation analysis, and using the community of practice theory, the paper analyses and discusses some of the discourse strategies used by the CEO in giving corrective feedback (as an instantiation of mentoring) and assigning tasks (as an instantiation of managing). A particular focus of the analysis is on those instances where the CEO seems to be performing mentoring and managing activities simultaneously. In these instances, where he skilfully combines strategies that are indexed for both activities (which evoke different identities), it is difficult to pinpoint which professional identity exactly he is foregrounding. Thus, rather than conceptualising identity construction as a fluid exchange of different identities, it appears to be more promising to acknowledge that sometimes several professional identities are constructed and enacted at the same time.