The Wiley International Handbook of Mentoring

Beverly J. Irby, Jennifer N. Boswell, Linda J. Searby, Frances Kochan, Ruben Garza, Nahed Abdelrahman, Beverly J. Irby, Jennifer N. Boswell, Linda J. Searby, Frances Kochan, Ruben Garza, Nahed Abdelrahman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119142959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

The first collection in the area of mentoring that applies theory to real-world practice, research, programs, and recommendations from an international perspective

In today's networked world society, mentoring is a crucial area for study that requires a deep international understanding for effective implementation. Despite the immense benefits of mentoring, current literature on this subject is surprisingly sparse. The Wiley International Handbook of Mentoring fills the need for a comprehensive volume of in-depth information on the different types of mentoring programs, effective mentoring practices, and emerging practical and applicable theories. Based on sound research methodologies, this unique text presents original essays by experts from over ten different countries, demonstrating the ways mentoring can make a difference in the workplace and in the classroom; these experts have an understanding of mentoring worldwide having worked in mentoring in over forty countries.

Each of the Handbook's four sections—mentoring paradigms, practices, programs, and possibilities—include a final synthesis chapter authored by the section editors that captures the essence of the lessons learned, applies a global context, and recommends research avenues for further exploration. This innovative volume demonstrates how mentoring in any culture can help employees to complete tasks and advance in their positions, aid in socialization and assimilation in various settings, provide diverse groups access to resources and information, navigate through personalities, politics, policies, and procedures, and much more.

• Offers an inclusive, international perspective that supports moving mentoring into a discipline of its own and lays a theoretical foundation for further research
• Shows how emerging practical theories can be implemented in actual programs and various scenarios
• Examines a wide range of contemporary paradigms, practices, and programs in the field of mentoring, including a panorama of introspections on mentoring from international scholars and practitioners
• Includes historical and epistemological content, background information and definitions, and overviews of fundamental aspects of mentoring

The Wiley International Handbook of Mentoring is an essential volume for a global readership, particularly teachers of mentoring courses, trainers, and researchers and practitioners in a variety of fields such as business, education, government, politics, sciences, industry, or sports.

Section I
Mentoring Paradigms

Beverly J. Irby and Rubén Garza

Section Editors

1
Defining Mentoring: An Elusive Search for Meaning and a Path for the Future

Nora Dominguez¹ and Frances Kochan²

¹ University of New Mexico, USA

² Auburn University, AL, USA

In theoretical discourse, scholars tend to agree on essential qualities of mentoring but dispute the implications of their formal and specific articulation(s). General consensus proposes that mentoring is, in its most basic form, a developmental relationship grounded in and molded by philosophical, historical, and sociological factors (Clutterbuck, Kochan, Lunsford, Domínguez, & Haddock‐Millar, 2017; Mullen, 2012). There is also a basic tendency to personify mentoring as a relationship between an older, more experienced mentor and a younger, less experienced mentee; these relationships are often thought to serve varied purposes, such as developing the mentee's career (Ragins & Kram, 2007), fostering his or her personal development (Nunes & Dashew, 2017), or enabling him or her to adapt to another cultural context (Reeves, 2015). Researchers who examine the underpinnings of mentoring‐related research in some detail, however, consistently note that there is general disagreement about how it should be defined (Johnson, Rose, & Schloser, 2007). In effect, these discursive discrepancies suggest that, while mentoring is codified on elemental levels, it ultimately possesses multiple definitions that lack a common framework (Bozeman & Feeney, 2007; Dawson, 2014; Haddock‐Millar, 2017).

Purpose and Overview

The purpose of this chapter is to assess definition processes for mentoring and offer recommendations for dealing with such issues in future research and practice. The chapter begins with a brief summary of the salient beliefs and disagreements within the field's discursive exploration of mentoring definitions. Subsequently, a section on methodology describes procedures used to gather and analyze semiotic usage and frequency. This description is followed by a general discussion about the rationale and risks of attempting to provide mentoring definitions, and why a singular definition has been so elusive. Building on these concepts, the next section of the chapter details the most cited definitions of mentoring, the primary elements they contain, and the withstanding implications of the latter. The chapter concludes with a recommendation for an innovative systematic structure to define mentoring across the various contexts in which it occurs.

Method

This study is an extension of work originally conducted by Domínguez; the conclusions presented in this chapter are a content analysis of her 2012 literature review, Mentoring Unfolded: The Evolution of an Emerging Discipline. Domínguez reviewed 588 scholarly publications, from which she identified seminal mentoring definitions contained within the corpus, determined the definitions most often cited, and honed in on definitions' most common and shared elements. Building on these findings, this study details a research‐based process to define mentoring; though the process draws boundaries for operational definitions, it also permits flexibility in ideating mentoring and judging its effectiveness.

Rationale for a Creating a Definition of Mentoring

The call for a single definition of mentoring is pervasive in the mentoring literature. Multiple authors claim that the failure to provide a universal definition prevents the evolution of mentoring research and hinders its practice. Jacobi (1991) believes a working definition for mentoring is needed to improve the quality of scholarly discourse, noting that “everyone is using it loosely, without precision,” which creates “a false sense of consensus, because at a superficial level everyone ‘knows’ what mentoring is” (p. 508). Effectively, this miscommunication could threaten analyses of developmental relationships, which require a well‐defined foundation sturdy enough to support the evolution of more complex structures. Providing stature for mentoring discourse, however, is an intricate process in and of itself; the articulation of mentoring must balance on a “fine line between a definition that is broad enough to capture its full potential and one that is so broad that it dilutes the concept to the point of being all things to all people” (Smith, 2003, p. 4).

Confusion within mentoring's definitional issues is also disruptive to additional disciplinary understandings and methodologies. Without a clear definition, it is difficult to make distinctions between mentoring and other theories, such as those in coaching, training, induction, and socialization. In effect, this hinders theory‐building within research and in practice “most notably, at refined levels” (Haddock‐Millar, 2017; Mullen, 2012, p.9; Smith, 2003). Methodology is one such level; without clear definitions and boundaries researchers cannot study processes and their respective results. As Johnson (2007) observed, “interpreting and comparing research outcomes are hampered by a conflation of several closely allied but nevertheless distinct relational constructs” (p. 190). Moreover, when researchers avoid defining the construct, it leads to the risk of studying different phenomena in a single study; researchers need operational definitions to clarify the type of relationship under observation and avoid idiosyncratic interpretations of their findings, which, if not dealt with properly, will devalue their results (Johnson et al., 2007). Clutterbuck (2013) agreed, noting that unless the mentoring concept is clarified, it is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate its study.

In addition to causing problems in research design, obscure concepts of m...