Protégés’ and mentors’ reactions to participating in formal mentoring programs: A qualitative investigation

“Mentors are more effective when they create and maintain a personal connection to their mentees. We maintain professional arrangement, and also enter our mentee’s world in meaningful ways.”

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"One final finding regarding training is that mentors who reported the training was of high quality were also more likely to report providing psychosocial mentoring. Although it is speculative, perhaps higher quality training includes more breadth of topics and focuses on not just the career-related roles that mentors might fulfill for protégés but also provides guidance on how to develop a close interpersonal relationship with protégés. Clearly, a more in-depth examination of what constitutes high-quality training and what it is that both mentors and protégés learn during the training process represents an important next step for research.

Another interesting finding is that psychosocial mentoring as reported by 1 mentoring partner related to psychosocial mentoring reported by the other mentoring partner. The social psychology literature on close relationships sheds some light on this finding.

As relational partners grow closer, they tend to relate to one another as a couple and develop a sense of mutual interdependency (Huston & Burgess, 1979). As such, one would expect that reports of psychosocial mentoring from each mentoring partner would be consistent. On the other hand, career mentoring, role modeling, and mentorship quality reported by 1 partner did not relate to the reports provided by the other partner after controlling for perceived input into the mentoring process and receipt of training. This may be because career mentoring and role modeling are not marked by emotional closeness. As such, there may be more room for individual interpretation of relational events. Additionally, mentors and prote´ge´s may use different criteria in assessing mentorship quality. As recipients of support, protégés may gauge quality in terms of the ability of the relationship to enhance their own sense of personal and professional competence (Kram, 1985).

In contrast, formal mentors might be more likely to reflect on the extent that they learned from the relationship and enjoyed interacting with the protégé (Eby & Lockwood, 2005).