mentoring

mentoring, professional relationship between two individuals, usually a senior and a junior employee in an organization, in which the senior employee teaches the junior employee about his job, introduces the junior employee to contacts, orients him to the industry and organization, and addresses social and personal issues that may arise on the job. The mentoring relationship is different from other organizational relationships (e.g., supervisor-subordinate) in that the mentoring parties may not formally work together, the issues addressed may include nonwork matters, and the bond between mentor and protégé is usually closer and stronger than that of other organizational relationships.

Mentors provide two primary functions to their protégés. Psychosocial mentoring focuses on the enhancement of identity, competence, and effectiveness in the professional role and includes role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, counseling, and friendship. Career-related mentoring focuses on success and advancement within the organization—which often occurs faster for mentored than nonmentored employees—and includes sponsorship, coaching, exposure, protection, and challenging assignments.

Mentoring relationships have been theorized to progress through four distinct stages. In the initiation stage, mentors and protégés are just beginning the relationship and learning about each other. During the second phase, cultivation, the greatest amount of learning occurs, and benefits are obtained. As the needs of mentors and protégés evolve, the partnerships enter the separation phase. The protégés begin to assert independence, and the mentors begin to consider that they have no additional knowledge to share with the protégés or guidance to provide. The final phase of the mentoring relationship, redefinition, occurs when the relationships transform into those of peers or colleagues.

Mentoring relationships are reputed to be beneficial for protégés, mentors, and organizations. Most research into mentoring’s benefits has focused on protégés. Specifically, individuals who are mentored advance more rapidly, earn higher salaries, have greater job satisfaction, and have fewer intentions to leave the organization. Research also indicates that being mentored is related to greater socialization, career planning, involvement, motivation, and self-efficacy (confidence in achieving work tasks).

Less research has focused on benefits to mentors. Qualitative studies suggest that mentors achieve personal satisfaction from passing knowledge and skills on to others, exhilaration from the fresh energy provided by protégés, improved job performance from receiving a new perspective on the organization from protégés, loyalty and support from protégés, and organizational recognition. A few quantitative studies have yielded similar findings, indicating that mentors report that mentoring provides personal satisfaction and improved work performance.

Mentoring is also said to provide benefits to the organization. For example, mentoring programs can help the organization by attracting talented employees who see mentoring programs as evidence of the organization’s commitment to employee development, reducing individual employee turnover, enhancing employee productivity, and increasing the retention of women and minorities.