When Developers Disagree: Divergent Advice as a Potential Catalyst for Protégé Growth
研究了受指导者同时从多位指导者获得分歧建议时，如何通过积极应对或消极回避两种过程影响个人成长，发现积极应对能促进成长，而回避则无成长，且两者可能交替导致不同结果。
Developmental relationships offer rich opportunities for personal growth, which enables people to operate effectively in complex work environments. Although it is now widely recognized that protégés typically have more than one developmental relationship simultaneously, few researchers have considered the ways in which developmental networks—comprising a protégé’s multiple developers—foster growth. We therefore know little about how protégés grow through their engagement in several concurrent relationships. In this paper, we suggest that understanding growth in the context of developmental networks requires viewing such networks as intertwined assemblages of dyadic relationships. Adopting this perspective, we theorize one way in which the interactions that protégés have across their various relationships may—cumulatively—catalyze growth. In our theorizing, we focus on a specific type of situation: instances when developers offer divergent advice about work-related issues. Our model traces how protégés cope with divergent advice through either an engaged grappling process or an avoidant retreating process. We theorize that whereas grappling activities yield high levels of growth, retreating activities produce no growth. However, we also suggest that protégés may oscillate back and forth between the grappling and retreating processes over time, thereby resulting in varying rather than binary growth outcomes. Our paper contributes to scholarship on developmental relationships and networks while also laying the groundwork for future empirical research.