Mentoring

Mentoring refers to the process by which a senior person (mentor) takes an active interest in sponsoring the career of a more junior person (protégé). Named for a fabled character in Homer's The Odyssey who tutored and looked after the title character's son, mentoring is a process that has been used for centuries as a means of handing down tradition, supporting talent, and securing future leadership. It flourished in the feudal system of the Renaissance as young men served apprentices to gain membership in guilds. Throughout history it is rare to study the career of highly successful individuals and not find the presence of a mentor. Aristotle mentored Alexander the Great, civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton mentored Thurgood Marshall, Gertrude Stein mentored Nobel Prize winning novelist Ernest Hemingway, and master salesman John Patterson mentored IBM founder Thomas Watson.

The popularity of mentoring reflects a confluence of interests of three different parties. Jobholders view mentoring as a means of meeting their career goals. Organizational officials are attracted to mentoring as an effective mechanism for extending their legacy and [Page 1367]developing employees. And finally, individuals who are concerned with correcting injustices in existing career systems see mentoring as one tool for doing so. Advocates of mentoring have made it a widespread phenomenon touching the work lives of roughly two in five contemporary employees.

The outcomes of mentoring have been found to be generally positive but by no means equivalent for both partners. Protégés enjoy enhanced career mobility, compensation, and job satisfaction. Mentors are thought to accrue comparatively fewer and “softer” benefits such as career visibility, information acquisition, selfenhancement, and a sense of generativity. Even so, the experience of mentoring apparently makes these benefits more salient, since it makes them more willing to mentor others than individuals who have no mentoring experience.

In spite of these benefits, a number of ethical questions have been raised about the mentoring process. Some have criticized it for being too time-consuming. Others have indicted mentoring for resulting in favoritism and empire building. Along those lines, some have pointed out that mentoring tends to exclude women and people of color and that it is a conservative process that reinforces the status quo. Specific abuses in the mentoring partnership have also been reported. Mistreatment reported by protégés includes tyrannical and manipulative behavior such as revenge, political sabotage, and harassment. Similarly, some mentors report instances of dirty tricks and backstabbing by opportunistic protégés. Research has shown that such events are by no means rare within the mentoring relationship.