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The Structural Relationship among Career-Related Mentoring, Ambiguity Tolerance, and Job Search Effort and Behavior of Korean College Students

Although a substantial body of mentoring research has been conducted on students attending four-year colleges, the interplay of career-related mentoring, ambiguity tolerance, and job search effort and behavior has not been seriously investigated. Therefore, we examined the relationship between career-related mentoring and ambiguity tolerance, as well as job search effort and behavior, for the purpose of understanding how to better assist undergraduate college students achieve preliminary job search success. Data were collected via pencil surveys administered to 300 undergraduate students selected by purposive sampling from four colleges in Seoul, Korea. Correlation analysis and covariance structure analysis were conducted to examine the relationships between variables. A Sobel test was also conducted to check the mediation effect of the model. Results were consistent with our hypotheses and showed that there was a significant, indirect, positive effect of career-related mentoring on job search effort and behavior, mediated through ambiguity tolerance. Our study contributes to career-related mentoring and job search research by providing empirical evidence supporting the results. It has implications for universities, mentoring program design, and career guidance professionals.


Introduction
Job searching is an important part of life, and individuals often seek new career opportunities as opposed to being unemployed [1]. Undergraduate university students, aged approximately 18-25, are still in the process of completing their education and preparing themselves for entering the job market. They are not only students but also job seekers. According to Arnett [2], adults in this age group search for jobs requiring substantial preliminary experience, as they see knowledge about their future role as essential for a life-long career. Due to increasingly competitive job markets, college students must begin preliminary job searching much earlier than was previously necessary [3]. If students fail to devote adequate time and effort to their job search, they are less likely to find satisfying employment [4]. The difficulties young job seekers experience are somewhat mitigated when they are encouraged to be proactive and set goals [5]. As such, young adults today spend more time preparing for jobs than in previous generations [6]. This engagement with the job search process is stimulated through mentoring and psychosocial support [7].
Equally important is the emphasis on the relationship between mentor and mentee, and the use of the process as an impetus for personal reflection [24]. Theoretical and empirical papers have provided a better understanding of the motivations and benefits derived from mentoring that are closely related to individuals' career planning and development [25][26][27][28]. According to Crisp [29], college student mentoring consists of four subcategories: psychological and emotional support, degree and career support, academic subject knowledge support, and the existence of a role model.
Soelberg's job search and choice model proposed that potential jobs can be considered during several stages of investigation and information collection [30]. One's success in the job search is related to the sources used to obtain information about job vacancies and the intensity of following up on this information [31]. Thus, mentoring helps motivate students to look for job information and exert effort in the job search [32]. In fact, according to Nora and Crisp [12], college students perceive mentoring as psychological and emotional support, so mentoring is a way for students to adjust to vocational ideals by providing them with situational cues for the job market. Job searching is a long autonomous process of identifying valuable job information and is characterized by the need to self-motivate, persevere, and cope with uncertainty and rejection [33]. Therefore, the process is typically viewed as self-regulated and enables individuals to guide their goal-directed activities over time, regardless of changing environments [34][35][36][37]. As the mentoring process requires the participation of self-motivated learners [23], it could be conducive to developing these competencies in job searchers.
Job search effort refers to the subjectively felt cognitive, emotional, and behavioral investments made in job searching, and assesses the extent to which individuals engage in the search [1]. That is, measures of job search effort assess the general amount of energy and time devoted to job searching [38]. In contrast, job search behavior refers to the frequency with which individuals engage in specific activities to acquire knowledge and information about job-market alternatives [38,39]. Blau [40], however, mentions three types of job searching: preparatory job search behavior, active job search behavior, and general effort job search. These three aspects are considered to be subcategories of the job search variable and are analogous to the definitions of job search effort and job search behavior outlined in this paragraph. In the interest of clarity, we chose to name this variable job search effort and behavior as it is more representative of the subcategories it contains.
Acknowledging the unique characteristics of job searching as a dynamic, recursive, and self-regulatory process predicted by motivation [34], the theoretical framework of Bandura's social cognitive theory of self-regulation is useful as a basis for understanding the relationship between mentoring and job search effort and behavior [41]. Social cognitive theory is composed of three elements: behavioral, cognitive or personal, and environmental factors. These factors interact to play a critical role in one's motivation, learning, and self-regulation [42,43]. Self-regulation refers to the processes individuals employ that are systematically oriented toward attaining goals [44]. From this perspective, instruction, feedback, and social interaction contribute to the environmental factors that help individuals work toward their goals [43]. As mentors provide protégés with psychological and material support in the pursuit of their objectives [45], they are well-positioned to serve as role models and guide students to set career goals. Showing greater consideration for students' careers should increase their sense of control over such activities and career-related beliefs [27]. Thus, as a result of mentoring, students who believe they can successfully manage their careers ought to engage in greater career planning than students who do not [46]. On this basis, we propose the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 1 (H1). Mentoring will be positively related to job search effort and behavior.
For most individuals, the job search process is rarely considered enjoyable [35]. According to Xu and Tracey [9], with the increasing complexity of the vocational world in the 21st century, ambiguity in information is especially salient in career decision-making. In a complex and unpredictable job market, job seekers must control and adjust their thoughts and actions, and deal with rejection and disappointment [21,36]. Through self-regulation, individuals are more able to operate effectively in stressful conditions [47]. Thus, self-regulation helps to initiate and maintain planned activities.
A lot of time and effort is needed to identify valuable and unambiguous information in a job search [48]. One functional way of handling informational ambiguity could be building preference and tolerance, and limiting aversion for ambiguity [9]. Ambiguity tolerance is defined as the way individuals perceive and respond to ambiguous situations or stimuli characterized by an array of unfamiliar, complex, or inconsistent clues [49]. It is an important characteristic of the career decision-making process [9]. The term ambiguity is often used interchangeably with the term uncertainty [18], and tolerance of uncertainty is a valuable skill to be acquired from the mentoring process [50].
According to Conner [20], students reported that they had more understanding of the ambiguity of career directions after mentoring. Mentoring is also an effective learning process for college students to understand the job market, compromise, and adjust their vocational ideals [21]. Therefore, students' tolerance for ambiguous situations varies according to their personal perception of these situations. This could be positively influenced by mentoring, as students are typically expected to interact with a mentor to receive useful information and relieve tensions related to unpredictable situations. As such, we propose the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 2 (H2). Mentoring will be positively related to ambiguity tolerance.
According to Van Hooft, Wanberg, and Hoye [35], self-regulation includes regulation not only of behavior but also of cognition and emotions. Self-regulation is especially needed in extreme conditions when individuals must withstand emotional pressure and find compromises in a relationship by maintaining a positive attitude [47]. Within social cognitive theory, self-efficacy refers to the verbal persuasion and observing of models that successfully help to increase efficacy beliefs and performance of a specific task [51]. A negative relationship has been shown between job search self-efficacy and ambiguity aversion in career decision-making [17]. Although independent constructs, Xu and Tracey [9] found a moderate negative correlation between ambiguity aversion and ambiguity tolerance in college students' career-related decision-making. This suggests that as an individual's tolerance for ambiguity increases, they may be better equipped to deal with the complex, uncertain situations they face when searching for a job.
As mentioned earlier, the ability to tolerate ambiguity is an important skill in the job search process [52]. Likewise, ambiguity tolerance is closely related to a self-regulatory framework [47,53]. In career-related mentoring, self-efficacy is important and, according to Lane and Klenke [53], ambiguity tolerance is important to the formation of self-efficacy as task complexity increases. In fact, in a highly complex task, students with a higher tolerance for ambiguity reported higher self-efficacy [18]. Individuals with high ambiguity tolerance may seek out uncertain tasks, enjoy them, and persist despite initial failures [18]. Finally, Teoh and Foo [54] discovered that ambiguity tolerance was related to self-perceived performance. Also, people who perceived ambiguity as most threatening did not use all available information in making decisions [55]. In terms of job searching, this view suggests that individuals with little ambiguity tolerance are more likely to experience stress, react prematurely, and judge themselves as being less capable to search for jobs [49]. On this basis, we propose the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 3 (H3). Ambiguity tolerance will be positively related to job search effort and behavior.

The Mediating Role of Ambiguity Tolerance between Mentoring and Job Search Effort and Behavior
Finally, we aim to examine if college students' ambiguity tolerance mediates between mentoring and job search effort and behavior in order to develop a greater understanding of the factors that may facilitate greater job search success for students. Related to this, the career exploration process is exhibited as a component of monitoring and an adjustment of vocational choice [56]. Elsewhere, the mediating role of ambiguity tolerance could be considered to be an aspect of self-reactiveness; an element of social cognitive theory that encompasses motivation for future action, self-monitoring of environmental conditions, and self-regulatory processes that link thought to action [41]. In addition, Gottfredson's [48] theory of circumscription and compromise can be applied to the proposition that the adjustment of vocational aspiration is related to helping students transition from school to work by providing them with information based on reality [57]. In this regard, when mentoring is considered as an environmental factor in Bandura's [42] social cognitive theory, it may have a positive effect on ambiguity tolerance as an aspect of self-reactiveness.
Adjustment to reality occurs largely as a process of learning, such as from mentoring, before entering the job market and is the process of compromising between the self and reality [48]. Specifically, Gottfredson [48] views self-creation as an important factor when young people are making plans to enter the job market. Self-creation refers to an individual's capacity for increasingly self-directed development with regard to their future careers. By promoting self-agency, people in positions of influence can help students to more readily prepare for a job search. Bandura [58] views self-efficacy as the single most important mechanism of agency. As individuals with a higher tolerance for ambiguity report higher self-efficacy when confronted with complex decisions [18], this suggests that mentors can assist students with timely, thoughtful insight about the job market. Mentors could help increase students' ambiguity tolerance and self-efficacy by stimulating them to consider all surrounding environments and setting and pursuing goals. Individuals with higher self-efficacy exert greater effort on a task and are more persistent, which is of benefit in the job search process [59].
Although there is no existing study on the mediating role of ambiguity tolerance in the relationship between mentoring and job search effort and behavior, both social cognitive theory and circumscription and compromise theory suggest that college students with high ambiguity tolerance "may perceive ambiguous situations or information as desirable and interesting" [9] (p.2). Zikic and Saks [60] found that career resources were positively correlated with job search self-efficacy which, elsewhere, has been shown to be positively affected by ambiguity tolerance in complex tasks and decision-making [18]. In this case, career resources provide job searchers with a broader pool of knowledge about the job search process and include counseling and advice, which is often provided by mentors. The authors placed emphasis on the job searchers as active agents [60]. Therefore, exerting effort in job searching is logical and the relationship between mentoring and job search effort and behavior may be mediated by ambiguity tolerance. See Figure A1. On this basis, we propose the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 4 (H4). Ambiguity tolerance will mediate the relationship between mentoring and job search effort and behavior.

Participants and Procedure
The research was conducted for four weeks starting on 2 September 2015. Data were gathered from pencil surveys administered to 300 undergraduate students enrolled at four-year colleges in Seoul, Korea. Purposive sampling was implemented to select participants of four colleges that executed mentoring programs. Two of the colleges operated formal mentoring programs, and the other two had policies that strongly recommended mentoring experiences for students. Through the university's career center, the mentoring program matched alumni and university students based on the students' career interests. Of the 300, 50 surveys were deemed invalid or void due to errors in completion or being marked as having no mentoring experience. This left a total of 250 completed samples to be used for analysis.

Measures
The instruments of this study were obtained from previous studies. The scale range was from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). To examine the adequacy of the scales, inter-correlations were taken.

Career-Related Mentoring
In this study, the wording of Crisp's [29] 25-item College Student Mentoring Scale (CSMS) was modified to fit the career-related mentoring received by Korean college students from mentors. Finally, 18 items were used to measure career-related mentoring (see Appendix B). CSMS was employed since it was validated for representative samples of undergraduate students attending a four-year college, and was widely accepted and employed in several studies [15,61,62]. Participants responded with their opinions about their mentors and their behaviors during mentoring.
3.2.2. Ambiguity Tolerance 16 items previously developed by Xu and Tracey [9] were used for the study. Participants provided responses estimating their tolerance related to job searching and decision ambiguity. Sample items include "I enjoy tackling complex career decision-making tasks" and "I am tolerant of the potential difference between my perception and the reality of a career".

Job Search Effort and Behavior
A total of 14 items were used to measure job search effort and behavior. We used four items previously developed for evaluation of the job search effort [40]. Participants were asked to estimate their job search effort through items such as "I put in enough time to find a job" and "I make an effort to find a job". We also used 10 items previously developed to evaluate preparatory job search behavior and active job search behavior [40]. Items include "Read the help wanted/classified ads in a newspaper, journal, or professional association", "Prepared/revised your resume", "Sent your resumes to potential employers", and "Filled out a job application".

Analyses
The data collected in this study were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 21.0 and AMOS 20.0 programs. First, a validity check of each variable was executed. Second, the reliability of independent variables, dependent variables, and mediating variables was verified by checking Cronbach's α value. Third, correlation analysis was conducted to check the relationships between variables. Fourth, covariance structure analysis was conducted to examine the fitness of the research model and check the relationships between variables. Fifth, a Sobel test was conducted to check the mediation effect of the model.

Results
Means, standard deviations, Cronbach's α, and correlations of the study variables are shown in Table A1. All Cronbach's α values are over 0.6, and most of the variables in the model have a direct relationship to each other.
We conducted a confirmatory factor analysis to check for a common method variance among the variables in our study. The result showed that this research model with four factors of career-related mentoring variables, three factors of ambiguity tolerance, and three factors of job search effort and behavior provides a good fit to the data (χ 2 = 57.  Table A2. Our hypothesized model (partial mediation model) fits the data Sustainability 2020, 12, 8834 7 of 14 well: χ 2 = 57.15, p < 0.01, comparative fit index = 0.971, standardized root-mean-square error of approximation = 0.056, meeting the goodness-of-fit criteria suggested by Hu and Bentler [63]. Table A2 shows the fit statistics for the alternative models testing for full mediation. The alternative full mediation model also shows good model fit: χ 2 = 57.88, p < 0.01, comparative fit index = 0.971, standardized root-mean-square error of approximation = 0.055. However, the full mediation model failed to display a significantly improved fit to the data, (∆χ 2 = 0.73, ∆df = 1) in comparison with the partial mediation model. Other indices did not show evidence of a big difference in model fit between the partial and full mediation models. Thus, partial mediation is the better model to examine our research.
The standardized path estimates are presented in Table A3. Hypothesis 2 (r = 0.413, p < 0.001) and Hypothesis 3 (r = 0.573, p < 0.01) are supported. Since mentoring is not significantly related to job search effort and behavior variance, Hypothesis 1 failed to gain support.
To test Hypothesis 4, the model comparison between partial mediation and full mediation presented in Table A3 was executed. The standardized path estimates of our hypothesized model partial mediation revealed that the indirect effect from mentoring to job search effort and behavior is 2.2 times larger than the direct effect between mentoring and job search effort and behavior. See Table A3.
In addition, the Sobel test was executed to confirm the mediating effect of the partial mediation model. The z value of our hypothesized model is 2.655 (p < 0.01). Since the z value is greater than 1.97, the mediating effect of this model is significant.

Discussion
To understand how to better assist undergraduate college students in achieving preliminary job search success, we examined the structural relationships among career-related mentoring, ambiguity tolerance, and job search effort and behavior. Our study contributes to mentoring research by providing empirical evidence that career-related mentoring impacts positively on students' ambiguity tolerance. According to Ashford [64], individuals seek feedback on important issues and in new and uncertain situations. That is, faced with increased stress and uncertainty, individuals are likely to place added value on the psychosocial aspects of mentoring, as it helps individuals deal with these negative issues [65]. Although ambiguity tolerance has not been a central construct in mentoring and job searching, there have been findings of an association between the two [20,50,66].
In addition, there was an indirect, significant, positive effect of career-related mentoring on job search effort and behavior through ambiguity tolerance. Ambiguity tolerance mediated between career-related mentoring and job search effort and behavior, which in turn indirectly influenced job search effort and behavior. According to Lazarus and Folkman [67], social support can help individuals cope with and adapt to stressful situations such as a job search. Adaptable individuals have a high tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity [68]. Such ambiguity tolerance generally supports career decision situations and may also prevent feelings of paralysis during times of turbulence [9,69]. This implies that social support from mentoring plays an important role in motivating students to endure ambiguous situations. These students tend to be expending more effort on their job search. Self-regulation encompasses the systematic processes that individuals utilize to achieve their goals [44]. In this case, mentoring contributes to increased ambiguity tolerance which students intentionally try to build or self-regulate. This, in turn, benefits their job search. Thus, the mediational effect of ambiguity tolerance could be explained by self-regulation theory, which considers individual regulation of emotions [70]. Our results are also consistent with findings by Renn et al. [21] that mentor career support predicts career planning, job search intentions, and self-defeating job search behavior. Although our results supported findings that mentoring is positively related to ambiguity tolerance and helps students to give more thought to their job [20], the results contrast with research that found mentoring is positively and directly related to job search effort and behavior [32].
In contrast to our hypothesis, the direct influence of mentoring on job search effort and behavior was not revealed, probably because the participants in this study are neither university graduates nor Sustainability 2020, 12, 8834 8 of 14 unemployed job seekers. Although 31% of the respondents were fourth-year students approaching graduation, the rest of the students were current college students who had no need to find jobs immediately. According to Bao and Luo [71], actual job search effort and behavior does not necessarily occur even when individuals have high levels of behavioral intentions to change. In this regard, Saks and Ashforth [72] argued that the job prospects of university students are likely to be better than for mature unemployed job seekers. This can be interpreted to mean that fourth-year college students currently taking classes are not faced with immediate graduation. Therefore, even though they participate in mentoring sessions, they do not necessarily proceed with job searching immediately.
Another possibility for why there is no significant link between career-related mentoring and job search effort and behavior is that job search effort and behavior are a prerequisite, not for deciding a career, but for exploring. This leaves space to investigate the relationships among ambiguity tolerance, job search effort and behavior, and career decisions. Alternatively, the unique educational environment in Korea could explain the lack of a significant link. Most Korean students only focus on entering a high-ranking university when they are teenagers. After entering university, they are faced with the new, unfamiliar challenge of job searching, which could cause frustration. Therefore, it is necessary to build ambiguity tolerance through career-related mentoring and restoring self-confidence. As a result, college students might be better equipped to undertake activities related to their job search. Thus, additional studies are needed to examine the reason why the results are not consistent over time and whether the results in this study stem from contextual differences or other factors.
Our findings provide not only empirical evidence about the role of mentoring as an important antecedent of student ambiguity tolerance but also important implications for future student job search processes and college student mentoring research and practice. By examining the mediation effect of student ambiguity tolerance, our study links theoretical constructs in the career-related mentoring and job search effort and behavior studies to previously unexplored student ambiguity tolerance. It also addresses the need for careful examination of its explanatory power to develop better theoretical frameworks for career-related mentoring and job search effort and behavior.

Theoretical Implications
Social cognitive theory of self-regulation [70] was used as a framework to link career-related mentoring and job search effort and behavior, and to examine the mediating role of ambiguity tolerance that was unreported in previous studies. We specifically selected ambiguity tolerance because it provides psychological resources for self-regulated behavior, which research suggests may be predicted by mentoring [20,36,47,50]. Our study extends the extant literature by establishing empirical evidence of a link between mentoring and ambiguity tolerance. It also provides an incentive to investigate possible new theoretical frameworks between mentoring theories and self-regulation theories that attempt to explain the mechanism through which mentoring can help students develop their ambiguity tolerance.

Practical Implications
In addition to the effect of mentoring, our study highlighted the importance of ambiguity tolerance by examining its mediational role as a powerful explanatory factor. To our knowledge, our study is the first to link mentoring to student ambiguity tolerance, which might be regarded as one of the most important competencies related to job search activities in tough economic times. In the face of a dim economic outlook, mentoring might be used to increase tolerance for ambiguity during long job searches. Practically, we can provide universities with mentoring intervention options to improve students' job search effort and behavior by demonstrating that career-related mentoring is directly and positively related to students' ambiguity tolerance. Specifically, career counselors in universities should identify the benefits of mentoring and develop mentoring programs.
Finally, career-related mentoring is an important intervention for college students [21] to better understand the environment and situation of the job market. Thus, mentors who work for companies that provide genuine information about available jobs and job searching should be recruited. This means that mentors' expertise should be aligned with their proteges' career aspirations. In addition, mentors can explain the job market situation to students, so the careful selection of mentors is critical to whether the process is successful or not. University members in charge of planning mentoring programs should be concerned about whether the selected mentor can have a positive influence on a student's career and future.

Limitations and Future Directions
This study has some limitations. First, the survey samples were cross-sectional in nature. Longitudinal designs will be needed in the future to examine the results of the study. Second, the study results did not reveal that career-related mentoring was directly and positively related to job search effort and behavior, suggesting that the data from students who are not approaching graduation may not reflect recent university graduates' experiences in the job market. Therefore, future research is needed using samples drawn from either only university or college students approaching graduation, or recent graduates. Third, we did not consider different types of mentoring. Additional research could expand our model by comparing formal and informal mentoring.
Despite these limitations, this study is the first to examine not only the effects of career-related mentoring on ambiguity tolerance, job search effort and behavior, but also the mediating role of ambiguity tolerance between mentoring and job search effort and behavior. Career counselors in universities may use this study's results to strengthen students' ambiguity tolerance by providing effective career mentoring programs. It seems practical for researchers to identify and let faculty members and university career counselors know that job searching for emerging adults involves difficult processes of collecting useful information about the self and the job market, as well as using that information to identify an appropriate vocational choice.
Finally, the results of the study should be generalized to mature and older job seekers only with caution. As the participants in this study are college students, its findings might apply only to students who are currently enrolled in four-year colleges. Future research will be needed to examine samples from university graduates and mature job seekers.