The Association of Temperament and Character of Mentors/Mentees with Satisfying Formal Mentoring of First-Year Medical Students

There are limited data regarding personality matching of mentors and mentees in medical academic settings.
The current study aimed at investigating the relationships between satisfaction of 1st-year medical students with the mentoring program and the mentor/mentee characteristics of temperament and character.
In this prospective study, 99 first-year medical students (59.6% female) were enrolled as a part of formal university mentoring program during the 2012 - 2013 academic year. The mentees and mentors were gender-matched. Participation in the program and the study was voluntarily.
Overall, by employing the temperament and character inventory it was possible to correctly predict the satisfaction of a mentoring relationship within the range 65% to 84% through linear, logistic, and non-linear models. Mentees’ cooperativeness and mentors’ novelty-seeking were the significant predictors of total satisfaction scores (R2 = 0.131; P The current study results revealed that personality dissimilarities between mentors and mentees considerably influenced the satisfaction of mentees, which should be confirmed in prospective interventional studies.