The Research Article Award recognizes an outstanding piece of research that is published in a refereed journal and holds major implications for workplace learning and performance practitioners.

Mentorship Behaviors and Mentorship Quality Associated With Formal Mentoring Programs Closing the Gap Between Research and Practice

Tammy D. Allen

professor of psychology at the University of South Florida in Tampa

Lillian T. Eby

professor of psychology at the University of Georgia in Athens

Elizabeth Lentz

psychology doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida.

Formal mentoring programs have become an increasingly popular employee development tool. For more than a decade recommendations concerning the design and implementation of these programs have been offered in both the popular and scholarly press. Surprisingly, these recommendations have been subjected to little empirical scrutiny. The objective of this research was to investigate the design characteristics of formal mentoring programs that relate to the degree of mentoring provided by mentors and to mentoring relationship quality.

Data was collected from 175 proteges and 110 mentors who participated in 12 different formal mentoring programs across four organizations. Participants reported on three categories of program features: 1) participant input into the mentoring process, 2) dyadic structure of the relationship, and 3) formal program training. Participants also reported the degree that the mentor provided psychosocial and career support and the overall quality of the mentoring relationship.

The findings have several potential implications for organizations to consider when developing and designing formal mentoring programs. Results indicated that the dyadic structure of the relationship (for example, the geographic proximity of the mentor and the protege, pairing mentors and proteges from the same or different departments, or pairings based on rank) made little significant difference in mentoring outcomes. Thus, such factors may be less important when determining how best to match mentors and proteges. On the other hand, results indicated that input into the mentoring process consistently related to mentoring provided and to relationship quality. The study findings suggest that allowing formal mentoring program participants input into who will be their mentoring partner may enhance the benefits and quality of the mentoring relationship. With regard to training, results indicated that training alone was not associated with mentoring outcomes, but that there was a positive relationship with mentoring outcomes when the training received was reported by proteges as high in quality.

The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, 2006, volume 91, number 3.