Mentoring

Mentoring Functions and Stages

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 and includes sponsorship, coaching, exposure and visibility, protection, and challenging assignments.

Mentoring relationships have been theorized to progress through four distinct stages. In the initiation stage, the mentor and protégé are just beginning the relationship and learning about each other. During the second phase, known as cultivation, the greatest amount of learning occurs and benefits are obtained. As the needs of the mentor and protégé evolve, the partnership enters the separation phase. During this phase, the protégé begins to assert independence, and the mentor begins to consider that he or she has no additional knowledge to share with the protégé or guidance to provide. The final phase of the mentoring relationship is referred to as redefinition. Redefinition occurs when the relationship transforms into one of peers or colleagues.

Measurement of Mentoring

Two types of studies are commonly found in the literature. One type compares individuals with mentoring experience (protégés or mentors) with those without mentoring experience (nonprotégés or nonmentors) on some variable of interest. Participants are typically given a screening question that includes a definition of mentoring and classified into the experienced or nonexperienced group on the basis of their response. The second type of study examines the relationship between mentoring functions and other variables of interest. In this case, those who have mentoring experience also report on the career and psychosocial mentoring behaviors or functions provided during the course of the mentoring relationship.

Mentoring Benefits

Mentoring relationships are reputed to be beneficial for protégés, mentors, and organizations. Most benefits research has focused protégés. Recent metaanalytic research supports the notion that mentoring has both objective and subjective career benefits for protégés. Specifically, individuals who are mentored advance more rapidly in the organization, 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 career planning, career involvement, career motivation, socialization, and career self-efficacy.

Less research has focused on benefits to the mentor. 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 group performance. Researchers are beginning to examine how mentoring others may relate to more tangible career benefits to the mentor, such as increased promotion rates and salary. Initial results indicate that those who have mentored others report greater salary and rates of promotion than those without any mentoring experience.

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