Role of Mentors in Developing the Social Competencies (SC) of their Protégée-Entrepreneurs (PE) in High-Tech Incubators (HTI)

High-tech incubators offer their entrepreneurs mentoring services to help them achieve goals faster. In a successful mentoring relationship protégées learn from the statements, actions, questions, and communication styles of their mentors. Mentors can play an important role in developing their protégées’ social competencies, which allow them to increase their social capital. This research tests a predictive model for the contribution of mentors to the development of their protégées’ social competencies in a high-tech incubation environment. The predictor variables of the model are the active communication-time between mentors and their protégée entrepreneurs, and the age of a mentoring relationship, referred to as elapse-time. The outcome variable is the development of social competencies of protégée-entrepreneurs. Moreover, the levels of trust from protégée-entrepreneurs towards their mentors might moderate this time social competency relationship. The social competencies of individuals involve six elements: emotional expressivity, emotional sensitivity, emotional control, social expressivity, social sensitivity, and social control. The Social Skills Inventory (SSI), an established psychometric scale that captures all six dimensions of social competencies, is used to test this model. After the participation of 99 protégées entrepreneurs from 10 incubators at Ryerson University, a new seven-item trust scale has been validated; however, the roles of elapse-time and communication-time in developing the social competencies of protégée-entrepreneurs are not supported. Surprisingly, after the verification of the SSI, it turned out that it is not valid to the participating sample set. In conclusion, despite the claimed generalizability of the SSI, it is now questionable, and the creation of a social competency scale for incubated entrepreneurs is an opportunity for future research.