Supervisory mentoring for legal professionals: navigating between organizational and professional identities

Purpose From the lens of identity theory, this paper aims to examine the indirect effect of supervisory mentoring on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and burnout via organizational identification (OI) in lawyers. The paper also explores the interplay of the dual identification in professional workers by testing the moderating role of professional identification (PI) on the relationship between OI and work outcomes. Design/methodology/approach Using two-wave data from 14 law firms in Korea, composed of 23 partner lawyers and 96 associate lawyers, the authors tested the mediated moderation model using PROCESS. Findings The results show supervisory mentoring is mediated by OI and statistically significant moderation by PI that predicted OCB and burnout in lawyers. Specifically, highly professionally identified lawyers were less likely to engage in OCB but experienced higher burnout level, providing evidence of organizational-professional identity conflict in lawyers. Originality/value The findings demonstrate that identification processes operate differently for lawyers, thus the need for a different approach from the traditional mentoring research. The study highlights the important role of mentors for nurturing OI while preserving PI and helping them to navigate between the two identities for optimal individual and organizational outcomes.