Peer Mentoring Practices and Research Performance among Academic Staff in Higher Education

Evidence from Tanzanian Public Universities

While peer mentoring has been identified as one of the critical development activities in higher education institutions to improve academic research capacity of the academic staff, there is little empirical evidence of the individual aspects of peer mentoring that affect the research performance of academic staff in Tanzanian public universities. This study examined peer mentoring practices of mentoring support, knowledge sharing and professional development effect on research performance of academic staff in Tanzanian public universities. The study was anchored on Communities of Practice Theory, which was used to conceptualise peer mentoring as a collaborative academic process where participants provide each other with knowledge, research support and enhance professional research skills in scholarly communities. The study was quantitative using a cross-sectional survey research design. The target sample was 374 academic staff obtained using simple random sampling. Data were gathered based on a structured questionnaire. Analysis was based on 302 returned valid questionnaires from academic staff members from selected public universities in Tanzania. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4 software was used for data analysis to investigate the relationships between the constructs. The results indicated that the three aspects of peer mentoring, had positive and significant effects on research performance. Knowledge sharing demonstrated the strongest predictive positive and significant effect on research performance, followed by mentoring support and with the least but still strong support being professional development. The study results indicate that academic staff who are actively involved in supportive peer research communities, with ongoing knowledge sharing and collegial academic interactions, are more likely to enhance their research engagement, scholarly collaboration, and research productivity. The study adds to the existing body of higher education literature and mentoring literature by offering empirical evidence of the multi-dimensionality of peer mentoring and research performance implications in a developing higher education context. The results also contribute to the expansive use of Communities of Practice Theory when trying to understand the influence of collaborative academic space on academic research results in public universities. The study suggests that university administrators and policy makers institutionalize structured peer mentoring mechanisms, improve collaborative knowledge-sharing mechanisms and strengthen the research culture of universities in the sense of sustainable cooperation for realising scientific research performance.