Is Mentoring Always a Positive for Companies?

Mentoring can be described as a formal relationship in which a more senior or experienced person – the mentor – provides a variety of developmental advice and opportunities to a less senior or experienced individual – the protégé.

What we now know as mentoring was documented long ago – even mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey – and gained the attention of the organizational world in the 1970s and 1980s when widely publicised findings connected it with career benefits for protégés. Since then, mentoring has gained a prominent status, considered as an “all good” tool for organizations to develop their employees.

Today most large organizations – 98% of Fortune 500 companies – use formal mentoring, i.e.where mentoring relationships are officially arranged and sponsored by the organization. Furthermore, “experts” advise firms to foster “mentoring cultures”, i.e. conditions that enable employees to assume roles of mentors and protégés without formal organizational intervention.

The “Halo” Effect for Mentoring

Notwithstanding its celebrated status, there are important misconceptions about “what” mentoring can help with and “how” it realizes its benefits.

It seems that our mentality about mentoring has been shaped by the so-called “halo effect”, a cognitive bias where one positive (or negative) aspect of an object is generalized to other aspects of it without actual evidence. We know for certain that mentoring increases career prospects of protégés: better chances of promotion, faster salary progression, more high-profile projects, etc. And because of this, we (practitioners and often scholars) automatically also assume that receiving mentoring improves other key outcomes, such as protégés’ technical job knowledge, job performance, and ethos.

The issue, however, is that there is no compelling evidence that mentoring also benefits such critical outcomes. This is very important because, for example, organizational agents typically see mentoring as a performance improvement tool, that is they expect, as a result of mentoring, an increase in employees’ technical job knowledge and actual work output. For which, however, we have no evidence.

Furthermore, mentoring is a key part of a person’s social capital – the network of relationships and connections they have. Whilst social capital is often seen as a positive force, its negative effects have only recently been identified. For example, social capital can lead to increased cronyism and get in the way of merit-based decision-making. This means that, in some cases, mentoring not only fails to deliver its expected benefits, but may also cause harm to an organisation.

What is True about Mentoring?

There are in excess of 10,000 empirical studies on mentoring, at least 1,000 of them published in what is seen as “top” outlets. Considered together, these studies provide a warning in the sense that their findings do not justify many of the widely held beliefs about the benefits of mentoring. Specifically:

1. The “What“: No evidence that Protégés Perform Better on the Job than Non-Protégés

Overall, there is no solid evidence that having a mentor meaningfully improves protégé job performance. And yet it is clearly job performance that firms and governments are after. This is in major contradiction to the common perception.

To avoid any misunderstanding, job performance (actual job output) is different from career success (for example, receiving a promotion or a pay rise). Unfortunately, they are often seen as identical or interchangeable, but alas they are not! Job performance means employee output judged against the requirements of the job, as set by employers, customers and external certifications.

But, whether high job performance will lead to career rewards such as a promotion, a pay rise, or an assignment to a desirable project – depends on many factors. Among them, we can think the nature of reward systems, how and by whom performance is assessed, the state of the economy, and many others, including “chance“.

The only evidence we have for mentoring is that it helps protégés’ career success and sometimes well-being or happiness There is no evidence that it increases protégé job performance. This has been termed the “mentoring paradox“, the large gap between the belief that mentoring improves protégé job performance and the actual (absence of) evidence.

2. The “How“: Mentoring Helps Careers via Office Politics

If mentoring does not improve the job performance of protégés then how does it help protégés advance their careers? Research shows that mentoring helps careers via office politics, and not via job performance, in two ways.

The power, influence and political skill of mentors help protégés’ careers. For example, mentors may use their power to influence promotion decisions in favour of their protégés or to expose the protégés to senior decision-makers, or even to make sure their protégé is assigned to high-profile projects.

The second way is by improving protégés’ own political skills. Research finds that mentoring does not advance protégés technical job knowledge or skill. Instead, research finds that what protégés learn from their mentors is how to be politically astute, that is to identify the centres/people of power and then use political tactics, such as building alliances, to influence these centres/people to advance their own career interests.

The above makes more sense if we consider that mentors have not been found superior in job-related judgment or decision-making skills to non-mentors, and that mentors are most effective when they are seen by others as powerful and as possessing strong political skills. The problems with having politics (instead of job performance) determining organizational rewards are multiple, including lower morale, lost opportunities, inability to retain good performers, and sub-optimal organizational performance.

3. What Does Mentoring Do for Protégés’ Ethos?

This is a very sensitive yet key issue.

We know that the ethical stance of the mentor is passed on to the protégé. Mentors are seen as role models, and protégés identify with and assimilate much of mentors’ mentality and ways of doing things. Hence, if a mentor’s ethos is sub-standard, it is likely that this will be passed, or partly passed, on to the protégé.

There is no question that many managers and executives operate with high ethical standards. On the other hand, there are also people with questionable ethos who advance up the corporate ladder. This happens for various reasons: sometimes features like selfishness, duplicity, self-promotion and lack of remorse are helpful in career advancement.

Given that mentoring is about “learning the ropes”, individuals with such features are likely to pass their ethical stance to their protégés. To illustrate, people in the early part of their careers often observe their mentors engaging in unethical conduct, but they eventually become accustomed and come to view it as natural behaviour within the role. In the cases of firms that operated unethically, such as Enron and Worldcom, newcomers learnt these ways from their superiors who – having established themselves – mentored them to operate accordingly.

How to maximize the benefits of mentoring?

Mentoring is a precious social function. However, there is a substantial gap between what mentoring does and what practitioners and organizational agents believe it does. To take advantage of the undoubted benefits of mentoring without risking frustration or exposure to its potential detrimental effects, the following advice can be useful.

First, ensure that employees are aware that mentoring must also focus on improvements in knowledge and skills that are directly related to the job (such as technical and decision-making skills), and not just career advancement.

Ensure also that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is incorporated into training and briefings within formal mentoring programmes.

Eventually, evaluation of formal mentoring systems must also contain assessment of effectiveness in improving job-related skills and promoting corporate ethos and social responsibility. At present, such evaluations primarily focus on protégés’ satisfaction with their own career progression, and ignore other critical outcomes.