Thesupport that mentors offer can have considerable benefits, for boththeir proteges and the organisation at large. Recognising this, manydevelop formal mentoring programs to encourage and manage thisprocess. However, such a managed system provides different conditionsto an informal one, where parties identify an alignment of person andcircumstance. Frankie Weinberg and Melenie Lankau at the Universityof Georgia decided to explore what this means for mentorcontributions within formal mentoring relationships.
Weinbergand Lankau worked with a voluntary nine month mentoring program wherementor-protege pairs were formed by the organisation's executivecommittee; 110 such pairs joined their research. Questionnaires wereused to understand how much time mentors dedicated to therelationship, and how much they felt they were fulfilling variousmentoring functions: providing career guidance, psychosocial support,and role modelling good behaviours.
Mentoringrelationships are understood to move through phases, so the authorssampled mentors views twice: two months into the program and onemonth after its end. This allowed study of the initiation phase,where each party gets the feel of the other, and the followingcultivation phase, which insight and the relationship deepens.Mentoring activity is expected to be optimised during the cultivationphase, so Weinberg and Lankau investigated the relationship betweenthe time spent on mentoring, and the mentoring functions on offer.Time spent on mentoring increased all three mentoring functions duringinitiation (time one), but by the cultivation phase, time expendedwas even more strongly associated with enhanced mentoring function,suggesting an hour of mentoring is worth more during cultivation thanduring initiation.
Weinbergand Lankau were concerned that mixed-sex pairs may suffer in aformalised context, as weaker resemblance can lead mentors to investless effort than when working with a 'younger version of me'. Indeed,during the initiation period, mentors paired with proteges of theother sex overall reported providing lower levels of all threementoring functions. However, once they had reached the cultivationstage, these mixed-sex penalties disappeared for psychosocial supportand role-modelling, suggesting that increased familiarity managed toerode some of these barriers.
Thisstudy clearly evidences how formal mentoring relationships gainmomentum: after the initiation phase, investments into therelationship yield greater dividends and impediments to therelationship tend to be shucked off. So organisations consideringformal mentoring should ensure that the relationships they cultivatehave the time that they need to blossom.
