Doing Mentoring and Managing in Giving Corrective Feedback: A Study of Managerial Discourse in Business Meetings

Objectives: This paper explores a scarcely researched topic, namely, mentoring discourse. In particular, it addresses an underexplored issue that commonly exists in managerial mentoring. While leaders are encouraged to mentor their subordinates, the ultimate objectives of managing and mentoring may be quite distinct as the former orients to the company’s goals while the latter focuses on the subordinate’s development. This paper attempts to explore how leaders make use of discourse strategies to accomplish mentoring and managing practices in authentic leader-subordinate communication, with a focus on giving corrective feedback. Methods: The study adopts a discourse analytic approach and the research data consists of 14 hours of recordings of business meetings collected from a Hong Kong company, complemented by semi-structured interviews and workplace observations. Results: It is found that the leader under examination puts great emphasis on advancing the subordinates’ competence and is frequently engaged in mentoring. He often employs evaluating, explaining, and demonstrating to help subordinates recognize their mistakes and understand the rationale behind the mistakes. When a conflict between the subordinate’s interest and the company’s interest appears, the leader may, in addition to similar discourse strategies for giving corrective feedback and, give explicit instructions to ensure compliance. Conclusions: By conducting a detailed analysis of mentoring discourse, this study demonstrates that leaders skillfully make use of discourse strategies to do mentoring and managing simultaneously. It serves as a starting point for more comprehensive studies of mentoring at work in the future.