Educational leadership, autonomy and mentoring provided: investigating the moderating influence of educational leadership

The main purpose of this article is to study the influence of autonomy on mentoring provided and the moderating influence of having an educational leadership position. This cross-sectional survey was based on a questionnaire that was sent to 435 employees from 29 preschools in Norway. A total of 284 responses were returned, a response rate of 65.3%. Two research hypotheses were formulated. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to develop three measurement models and structural equation modeling based on multi-group analysis was used to test the hypotheses. The results revealed that autonomy increases the occurrence of mentoring provided at work and educational leadership moderates this relationship. The use of convenience sampling and self-reports are discussed, especially related to representativeness and reporting biases. This is an understudied area and no previous research has used a confirmatory approach to investigate how autonomy and educational leadership influence the occurrence of mentoring provided.