Fostering newcomers' work well-being through mentoring: The mediating role of career calling and the nonlinear moderating effect of team relationship conflict

Mentoring is central to newcomer socialization, yet its role in newcomers' meaning-making remains underexplored in the cultural sector. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study develops and tests a moderated mediation model in which mentoring enhances newcomers' work well-being through heightened career calling, and team relationship conflict exerts a nonlinear (U-shaped) moderating effect. Using multi-wave, multi-source data from 299 mentor-newcomer dyads in Chinese intangible cultural heritage firms, we find that mentoring is positively associated with work well-being through increased career calling. This indirect effect is stronger when team relationship conflict is either low or high, rather than moderate. These findings advance mentoring theory by revealing mentoring as a resource-enabling process, uncovering the double-edged nature of team relationship conflict as a resource pathway, and providing actionable guidance for mentoring design in cultural organizations.