Mentoring in organizations has been defined as a developmental relationship between an individual (protégé) and a more senior and influential manager or professional (mentor) according to Dreher and Cox,19961. The traditional mentoring has been modified in many ways to fit modern organizations. According to mentorcloud.com2, 70% of fortune 500 companies have formal mentor training programs in place. They are designed to increase employee productivity and organizational benefits. In this challenging market place, employers are leaving no stone unturned to gain competitive advantages over others.
A study released in 2010 by NPO Catalyst and Nationwide Insurance3 revealed that mentoring program can help organizations reduce turnover and increase overall performance of company. Despite the advantages, many companies are struggling to take full advantage of mentoring programs in their organization. This is why organizations should carefully plan, design implement, monitor these programs strategically.
Mentoring is a symbiotic relationship in which both the mentor and protégé benefit. Organizations have realized the advantages for them in these relations and started to exploit by creating formal mentor programs.
Protégé Benefits
The mentoring relationships would allow the mentor to display certain career and psychosocial functions that leads to behavioral responses from protégé. These behavioral responses ultimately effect the latter’s performance.
There are five paths that connect mentoring to career outcomes of protégé. Each of these paths entail certain mentoring functions according to Ramaswami & Dreher,20084.
1. Human Capital – A protégé can gain knowledge with the help of functions such as challenging assignments, coaching and role modeling provided by the mentor. These functions prepare protégé with information to achieve work objectives effectively by enhancing skills.
2. Movement Capital – The mentoring functions in this path are exposure, visibility and coaching. A protégé can get better exposure and visibility both within and outside the organization by socializing and exploring his/her areas of interest with the help of mentor. Once the area of interest is identified, the mentor coaches protégé to pursue the most viable opportunity.
3. Social/ Political Capital and Signaling – The functions that operate in this pathway are sponsorship, exposure and visibility, protection, and coaching. Sponsorship is the public support provided by the mentor to protégé during meetings and conversations with superiors that impacts his/her career advancement in the organization. Mentor will protect protégé by shielding them from any detrimental contact with senior officials until they are ready and knows how and when to interact.
4. Path Goal Clarity – Functions such as role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, counseling, friendship are used by the mentor to motivate protégé and support in the process of achieving career goals. By role modeling, the mentor teaches the protégé to learn attitudes and behaviors that improve skills. This function also motivates them to improve personality traits. By counseling protégé, the mentor can help to alleviate anxieties that interfere with their productive behavior.
5. Values Clarity – This pathway helps the protégé to clarify career decisions by understanding themselves and getting a professional identity.
Mentor Benefits
Very few studies examine the benefits of mentoring for mentor. However, some of the career and social outcomes for mentors have been discussed in Ramaswami & Dreher, 20084. They attempted to use pathways and functions similar to protégé along with few others to identify link between mentoring and outcomes.
1. Human Capital – Similar to protégé, mentor can also gain human capital from the relation. Mentor gets awareness of latest trends and can integrate any intergenerational differences.
2. Movement Capital – Friendship with protégé can be beneficial for mentor even if the protégé moves away from current organization. The protégé may feel indebted because of all the help provided by the mentor and might reciprocate with knowledge of external job opportunities. However, the organization faces turnover issues.
3. Optimal resource usage – Mentor can assign some of his challenging assignments to protégé to share his workload. This will help mentor and protégé to focus on multiple projects which in turn will boost overall productivity.
4. Social/ Political Capital and Signaling – Because of the sponsoring and exposure provided by mentor, they might gain unfiltered feedback on what others think of mentor. This will improve their job performance, creating a better work network and gain recognition in organization.
5. Identity Validation - Mentoring can help the mentor grow both professionally and personally by increasing awareness of their capabilities. This identity reinforcement coupled with desire to contribute will increase mentor’s professional satisfaction. This will help in talent pool development and reduce turnover costs for the organization.
Organizational benefits
Some outcomes of mentoring programs to organizations according to Ramaswami & Dreher, 20084 are:
1. Talent pool development and retention - Because of mentoring, there is a good chance that protégé will gain more knowledge and understanding of the organization in return increasing the talent pool. Because of the mentoring relationship, protégé and mentor are more prone to staying together which improves retention of talent pool.
2. Increased productivity and performance - Because of the mentor relationship, protégé might improve performance and productivity. At the same time, the mentor can also improve based on feedback from protégé. This mutual benefit scenario will increase the productivity and performance of the organization.
3. Employee job satisfaction - Mentoring improves the relationship between employees of an organization creating a support structure both professionally and personally. This helps on job satisfaction for both mentor and protégé.
Factors affecting mentoring relationships
Until now we have explored the mentoring relationships and how it benefits the mentor, protégé and organization. We will now look at some of the factors that come into picture before a mentor/protégé relationship is established.
1. Demographics
A person’s race and gender has been found to be one of the factors when it comes to establishing mentoring relationship. Most senior level positions in organizations have been dominated by white males (Ramaswami & Dreher,2008) 4. Hence, they have more advantage to providing effective mentoring than woman or people of other race.
Although mentoring can have positive effects regardless of sex, it has been found to have particular importance for woman’s career success (Ramaswami, Dreher, Bretz & Wiethoff, 2010)5.
2. Organizational context
Gender typed industries, introduce another dimension that foster stereotypical thinking about the qualities needed for success according to Ramaswami, Dreher, Bretz & Wiethoff, 20105. For example, in male dominated industries, success is attributed to competencies attributed to males. In such situations, it is not enough to have a mentor, but women have to strive to find a mentor in position of power, preferably male. The figure below, shows the relationship between senior male mentor and career satisfaction in various organizational contexts.
 |
| Fig. 1: Relationship between having a senior male mentor and cash compensation, Adapted from (Ramaswami, Dreher, Bretz & Wiethoff ,2010)5 |
3. Socio-economic status
Along with sex and gender, mentor position is also important because it determines their power and influence in the organization, described as “signal strength” by Ramaswami, Dreher, Bretz & Wiethoff, 20105. Career progress of young managers from high socioeconomic origins benefit from career mentoring compared to individuals from lower socioeconomic groups who will benefit from psychosocial mentoring (Whitely, Dougherty & Dreher,1991)6.
4. Attribute similarity
People with similarity in attitudes, interests, personalities and behaviors are likely to form relationships easily. This is based on the idea that similar individuals would enjoy working together (Dreher and Cox, 1996)4.
Mentoring and Business Success
For any workplace mentoring program to work, one has to align mentoring goals with performance management and career development. An SHRM article highlights that workplace mentoring can help to address human resources issues such as recruitment, succession planning etc. (Eversole, 2010)7. The following steps must be strategically implemented by organizations to make mentoring programs work:Program design
Mentor and protégé match making has to be strategically made based on skills and needs. HR should also account for gender, race, socioeconomic and organizational context and other factors discussed above before matching the mentor and protégé. Since, majority of power positions are still held by men (Ramaswami, Dreher, Bretz & Wiethoff, 2010)5, it might be necessary to match female protégé’s with them so that the gender imbalance in senior management can be eliminated.
Matching employees at different stages in career can be beneficial for reciprocal learning for all four generations in workforce.
Program Implementation
HR can define mentor and protégé responsibilities to reduce in ambiguity. They can help further by conducting survey of mentor and protégé expectations and sharing with employees. Also, employees in certain projects can be transferred to projects within the organization to augment skills. For any program to succeed, it is important for leadership to be on board and provide the support required. Training, succession management, networking are other links that can be used to provide career development opportunities.
Program Implementation
HR can define mentor and protégé responsibilities to reduce in ambiguity. They can help further by conducting survey of mentor and protégé expectations and sharing with employees. Also, employees in certain projects can be transferred to projects within the organization to augment skills. For any program to succeed, it is important for leadership to be on board and provide the support required. Training, succession management, networking are other links that can be used to provide career development opportunities.
Measure success
Certain goals can be tracked and measured while others cannot be translated or tracked using metrics. Companies should be able to track cost comparisons and cost savings based on outcomes with and without mentoring programs (Eversole, 2010)7. Without metrics, organizations cannot track progress and cannot identify appropriate action plans for successful implementation.
Certain goals can be tracked and measured while others cannot be translated or tracked using metrics. Companies should be able to track cost comparisons and cost savings based on outcomes with and without mentoring programs (Eversole, 2010)7. Without metrics, organizations cannot track progress and cannot identify appropriate action plans for successful implementation.
When the mentoring programs are not implemented properly, it can also take negative role and encourage favoritisms, lead to culture corruption, create performance losses and increased turnover (Ramaswami & Dreher, 2010)8. Considering the implications, it is very important for organizations to strategically design, implement and measure success of mentoring programs.
References
1) Dreher, G.F., Cox Jr. T.H., (1996). Race, gender, and opportunity: A study of compensation attainment and the establishment of mentoring relationships. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81(3), 297-308. https://doi-org.ezproxy.uis.edu./10.1037/0021-9010.81.1.297
2) Advantages of Mentoring- Organizational Perspective, Mentoring Platform for People Engagement on Mentor Cloud, Retrieved from https://www.mentorcloud.com/mentorcloud-blog/2018/09/05/advantages-of-mentoring-organizational-perspective/
3) Report: Making Mentoring Work. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.catalyst.org/research/making-mentoring-work/
4) Ramaswami, A., & Dreher, G.F. (2008). The Benefits Associated with Workplace Mentoring Relationships. Ch 13., in The Blackwell Handbook of Mentoring: A Multiple Perspectives Approach edited by Tammy Allen and Lillian Eby. Personnel Psychology, 62(2), 445–448. https://doi-org.ezproxy.uis.edu/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2009.01143_3.x
5) Ramaswami, A., Dreher, G. F., Bretz, R., & Wiethoff, C. (2010). Gender, Mentoring, and Career Success: The Importance of Organizational Context. Personnel Psychology, 63(2), 385–405. https://doi-org.ezproxy.uis.edu/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2010.01174.x
6) Whitely, W., Dougherty, T. W., & Dreher, G. F. (1991). Relationship of Career Mentoring and Socioeconomic Origin to Managers’ and Professionals’ Early Career Progress. Academy of Management Journal, 34(2), 331–350. https://doi-org.ezproxy.uis.edu/10.2307/256445
7) Minton-Eversole, T. (2018, April 10). Mentoring: Make It Pay. Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/organizational-and-employee-development/pages/makementoringpay.aspx
8) Ramaswami, A., & Dreher, G. F. (2010). Dynamics of mentoring relationships in India: A qualitative, exploratory study. Human Resource Management, 49(3), 501–530.
Comments
Post a Comment