Mentoring Dilemmas

Developmental Relationships Within Multicultural Organizations

Audrey J. Murrell, Faye J. Crosby, Robin J. Ely

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 1999
• eBook ISBN: 9781135684891
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The world is continually changing. As organizations become more diverse, the need to recognize and develop talent within others becomes more critical and more complex. Herein lies the fundamental dilemma that parties to these important relationships face. Based on a recent gathering in Amherst, the contributors of this volume attempted to help each other better understand the issues that they were facing in their own diversified mentoring relationships as mentors, protégés, or both. This volume is the result of their efforts.

Organized into three sections, the book focuses on the different types of mentoring perspectives--theoretical, empirical, and experiential. It addresses the following issues:
*Developmental relationships--the emerging themes and theoretical models that discuss the experiences of various ethnic populations,
*Empirical evidence--qualitative and quantitative research that examines the impact of diverse mentoring relationships,
*First-hand accounts--experiences that recount key lessons learned in various situations, including breaking the glass ceiling, among others.

I
Theoretical Perspectives

1
The Developing Literature on Developmental Relationships

Faye J.Crosby

University of California, Santa Cruz

In the late 1970s the well-known psychologist, Daniel Levinson of Yale University, was lead author on a book that represented the culmination of his career: Seasons of a Man’s Life (Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, & McKee, 1978) Levinson’s book rapidly became an international success. Translated into numerous languages, it sold record numbers of copies abroad and at home.

One arresting insight in Seasons of a Man’s Life concerns the importance of mentors in the development of White middle-class men. Among the 40 men they interviewed, Levinson and his colleagues found that the presence of a mentor was essential in the smooth transition from young adulthood to authoritative maturity. The mentor, according to Levinson,

may act as a teacher…[and]…as sponsor…. He [the mentor] may be a host and guide, welcoming the initiate into a new occupational and social world and acquainting him with its values, customs, resources, and cast of characters. Through his own virtues, achievements, and way of living, the mentor may be an exemplar that the protégé can admire and seek to emulate. He may provide counsel and moral support…. (p. 98)

To some, Levinson’s insight has a timeless quality. The very word mentor calls to mind classical Greece. As perhaps everyone knows, Mentor was the wise and caring servant to whom Odysseus entrusted oversight of the developing Telemachus, while he, the leader, was away from home on his famous adventures.

If timeless in some ways, in others Levinson’s work seems very rooted in a specific historical context. The men whom Levinson studied grew to maturity at a period when the armed services, the professions and corporate management were all virtually homogeneous. Like Telemachus, the men in Levinson’s study could expect all the public dramas of adulthood to play themselves out on a stage populated by others of the same gender and ethnicity. The context seems in some ways more antique than modern.

Today’s world differs from that of the 1970s. The sons and daughters of Levinson’s respondents face a very different public arena than that of their fathers. Contemporary schools and businesses are populated by White women and by people of color as well as by White men. How is Mentor to relate to Telemachus’ sister and cousins and distant relatives with different skin tones and different cultures? How are they to respond to Mentor and to each other?

Ours is a book that looks at questions of developmental relations in the multicultural 1990s. Students of organizational behavior constitute our primary audience. Yet because abstractions without concrete referents are of more interest to the theologian than to the social scientist, we also include in our scope practitioners in the field of human resources. The chapters that follow include conceptual or theoretical pieces, reviews of the literature, discussions of specific studies, and firsthand accounts.

The fundamental challenge for any volume like ours is to differentiate between the enduring aspects of developmental relationships in organizations on the one hand and on the other, the more transient expressions of underlying processes. Accurate descriptions of local conditions are essential elements by which models of human interactions are built. In order to be useful, descriptions of specifics must not be confused with projections of what appears to be generally true.

The question of sexual attractions in the workplace offers a clear illustration of what is at issue. In 1983 Nancy Collins published the first quantitative study of mentoring issues at work. Collins reported that 99 of the 381 female respondents to answer the question about romance admitted that they had had sexual relations with their mentor (p. 121).

Would Collins’ findings hold today? Men and women are often still attracted to each other—of this there is no doubt—yet given changing sexual mores of American business, it seems unlikely that 26 percent of contemporary crossgender developmental relationships result in sexual intimacies. Such, at least, was the consensus of human resource professionals from the New York area attending a meeting in June 1997 (Blake & Crosby, 1997). The publicity around Monica Lewinsky, does not challenge their view that times have changed.

In this chapter appears the groundwork for the rest of the book. I start with a historical overview of how scholars and practitioners have approached the issues of developmental relations over the last quarter century. I then outline some questions that arise for those who would understand and promote mentoring across the boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and social class. As a means of facilitating the search for useful answers, I propose some terminology that, in my view, advances the work of theoretical and empirical researchers by enhancing the links between theory and practice.

HISTORY OF RESEARCH ON DEVELOPMENTAL RELATIONS

The decade of the 1970s promised expanded opportunities to many Americans. An unpopular and unfortunate war had ended. The victories of the Civil Rights Movement still felt fresh. The Women’s Movement was gaining momentum, and educated liberal White men could still imagine that they would be allies to White women and to all people of color at no cost and with no change of self. Everybody was watching Sesame Street.

Given that scholarship reflects as well as shapes the times, it comes as no surprise that the 1970s was the decade when studies of healthy adult development gained special prominence. In 1976 Gail Sheehy published the best-selling book Passages, and in the same year an article entitled “The Mentor Connection: The Secret Link in the Successful Woman’s Life” appeared in New York Magazine, In 1977 appeared George Vaillant’s Adaptation to Life, in which a longitudinal study of a cohort of Harvard graduates reminded everyone that the “self-made man” is fiction. Anyone who couldn’t understand Vaillant’s insights (and many who could) would find in Rosabeth Kanter’s brilliant tome Men and Women of the Corporation, also published in 1977, a searing analysis of the ways in which gendered conventions, including conventions about networking, facilitate or inhibit success. 1977 also brought with it Henning and Jardim’s Managerial Woman. The next year the Harvard Business Review carried an article with the unambiguous title, “Everyone Who Makes It Has a Mentor” (Collins & Scott, 1978). Meanwhile, Seasons of a Man’s Life (Levinson et al., 1978), carrying its message that young men need mentors in their developmental journeys, was greeted with instant enthusiasm.

Over the course of the next few years there appeared a number of conceptual pieces (Cook, 1979; Fitt & Newton, 1981; Halcomb, 1980; Roche, 1979; Shapiro, Haseltine, & Rowe, 1978) in which vivid anecdotes or miniature studies were used to illustrate the authors’ theoretical points. These articles enjoyed frequent citations throughout the 1980s. So did the one quantitative study of the era that showed that when the PhD candidate and dissertation advisor were of the same gender, the candidate was more productive than when the pair crossed genders (Goldstein, 1979).

By 1981 the initial burst of interest in mentoring and related topics was ending. One unresolved issue that continued to elicit attention was how to make sure that women received the same amount and same kind of mentoring as men. Underlying the gender question was, of course, the assumption that mentoring and sponsorship represented good practices, practices that benefited everyone, especially the protégé.

It was to the question of how women might find mentors and might manage their mentoring relationships that Linda Phillips-Jones and Nancy Collins turned their attention. In 1982 Phillips-Jones published her doctoral dissertation as a book entitled Mentors and Protégés. The next year came Collins’ Professional Women and Their Mentors. Collins had contacted 600 impressive executive and managerial women from organizations in California and had received over 400 questionnaires. Collins supplemented her quantitative data with several dozen indepth interviews.

Considering the richness of Collins’ data, one might wonder why her book never received much attention in academic circles. Three explanations come to mind. First, as indicated in the subtitle of her book, Collins positioned her work as “a practical guide to mentoring for the woman who wants to get ahead” and thus fooled many scholars into thinking that she had fewer data than the more erudite-sounding works. Second, despite having quantitative data, Collins conducted no sophisticated analyses. All her statistics were descriptive, not inferential. Third, and probably most important, Collins’ definitions lacked crispness. She outlined the components of mentoring but did not clearly differentiate the emotional or psychosocial functions of senior-junior alliances from the more instrumental functions.

A similar lack of conceptual crispness also characterized Michael Zey’s study of 100 MBAs working in corporate America. Zey’s book, The Mentor Connection (1984), proposed a hierarchy of developmental functions, rank ordered according to their importance. Believing that behaviors are more important than feelings, Zey assumed a four-tiered model with “protégé is recommended by mentor for promotion” two ranks above “mentor enhances protégé’s sense of self” (p. 8). Because he did not support his controversial nosology with empirical data, Zey, like Collins, failed to capture a sustained scholarly audience.

Only with the publication of Kathy Kram’s articles (Clawson & Kram, 1984; Kram, 1983; Kram & Isabella, 1985) and book (Kram, 1985) did the field begin to show the orderliness for which some well-known social scientists had loudly called (Hunt & Michael, 1983; Merriam, 1983). Through her famous in-depth qualitative study of 18 pairs of junior and senior managers in a New England utility company, supplemented by a qualitative study of peer pairs, Kram seemed to legitimate an entire field of study. Mentoring at Work (Kram, 1985) soon became and has since remained the classic publication in the area of developmental relationships.

With Mentoring at Work, contemporary scholarship on developmental relations begins. Kram’s book has made its contribution by consolidating “available theories and empirical studies” (p. 2) and especially by systematizing concepts. Defining a developmental relationship as one that “contributes to individual growth and career advancement” (p. 4), Kram initially distinguishes between the classic mentor relationship and “other less involving, exclusive, and intricate forms like the sponsor relationship” and the peer support relationship (p. 4). Kram then draws on the work of Phillips-Jones (1982) and posits that there are two basic types of mentoring functions. The first type, career functions, involves sponsorship, exposure and visibility, coaching, protection, and challenging assignments. The second type of function, called psychosocial, includes, according to Kram, role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, counseling, and friendship. Whereas “career functions are those aspects of a relationship that enhance advancement in an organization” (p. 24), “psychosocial functions are those aspects of a relationship that enhance an individual’s sense of competence, identity, and effectiveness in a professional role” (p. 32).

Expanding on Halcomb’s (1980) ideas, Kram proposes in her book that developmental relationships can serve different functions at different stages in the life of a person’s career. Kram also outlines the phases of the idealized mentoring relationship. Without ignoring the limitations of and problems with mentoring, especially within the context of what she calls “the complexities of cross-gender relationships” (p. 105), Kram clearly articulates the reasons that both mentoring and the mentoring alternatives (namely peer relationships) should bring benefit to organizations, to mentors, and especially to protégés.

Toward the end of her book, Kram describes conditions that facilitate the establishment of mentoring. Kram encourages organizations to remove the obstacles to effective mentoring and to educate their workforces about the benefits of mentoring. She also discusses “structural change strategies” (p. 173) such as modifying the reward system so as to link pay or promotions to how well managers develop subordinates but warns against the establishment of formal mentoring programs.

Even if the match is not a poor one—that is, mentor and protégé like each other and want to build a relationship—both individuals can become anxious and confused about their new responsibilities as mentor or protégé. Seniors, when asked to mentor or coach, frequently have an idealized image of what this may entail. This image may cause considerable self-doubt and concern about their abilities to be successful. (p. 184)

“The risks,” concludes Kram, “of a formal mentoring system are high, and the potential benefits have not been clearly demonstrated” (p. 185).

In the decade or so following the publication of Mentoring at Work has come a raft of substantial empirical studies of the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of being in a developmental relationship for women and men in a variety of settings. Some of the quantitative studies of developmental relationships use rigorous sampling procedures to obtain samples of respondents from lists of educated or professional people (Atkinson, Casas, & Neville, 1994; Bahniuk, Dobos, & Hill, 1990; Burke & McKeen, 1995; Chao, Walz, & Gardner, 1992; Corzine, Buntzman, & Busch, 1994; Dreher & Cox, 1996; Gaskill, 1991; Goh, 1991; Mobley, Jaret, March, & Lim, 1994; Ragins & Scandura, 1994; Struthers, 1995; Swerdlik & Bardon, 1988; Tepper, Shaffer, & Tepper, 1996; Whitely, Dougherty, & Dreher, 1991); other studies use equally appropriate and rigorous techniques to select respondents from one or more participating locations (Basow & Howe, 1980; Burke, McKeen, & McKenna, 1993; Erkut & Mokros, 1984; Fagenson, 1988, 1989; Hill, Bahniuk, & Dobos, 1989; Javidan, Bemmels, Devine, & Dastmalchian, 1995; Klaw & Rhodes, 1995; Ragins & Cotton, 1991, 1993; Ragins & McFarlin, 1990; Scandura, 1992). Most of the data in the quantitative studies come from people working in corporate settings (Burke et al., 1993; Burke & McKeen, 1995; Caruso, 1992; Dreher & Cox, 1996; Fagenson, 1988,1989; Gaskill & Sibley, 1990; Goh, 1991; Ragins & Cotton, 1991, 1993; Ragins & McFarlin, 1990; Ragins & Scandura, 1994; Scandura, 1992), but quantitative data also come from government workers (Javidan et al., 1995), lawyers (Mobley et al., 1994; Riley & Wrench, 1985), psychologists (Atkinson et al., 1994), university faculty (Hill et al., 1989; Struthers, 1995), students (Basow & Howe, 1980; Erkut & Mokros, 1984; Gilbert, 1985), and teenagers at risk (Klaw & Rhodes, 1995). Rates of responding vary from percentages as high as the mid-60s (Atkinson et al., 1994; Gilbert, 1985; Javidan et al., 1995; Struthers, 1995) and even 70% (Scandura, 1992) to less than 30% (Bahniuk et al., 1990; Dreher & Cox, 1996). Generally the response rates fall between 40% and 60% and are thus quite acceptable.

Although the majority of the academic articles published since the appearance of Kram’s book present large scale quantitative studies, some articles contain small numerical studies (Bettencourt, Bol, & Fraser, 1994; Bowen, 1985; Ford & Wells, 1985; Kalbfleisch & Davies, 1991); some present qualitative studies (Ainslie & Pena, 1996; Maack & Passet, 1993; Stanulis, 1995; Thomas, 1989, 1990, 1993); some offer integrative reviews (Hale, 1995; Noe, 1988; Ragins, 1989, 1995, 1997) or conceptual pieces (Brinson & Kottler, 1993; Gilbert & Rossman, 1992; Olson & Ashton-Jones, 1992; Sandier, 1995); and some simply advocate for the concept of developmental relationships (Blackwell, 1989; Caudill & Carrington, 1995; Mathews, 1994–1995; Monaghan & Lunt, 1992; Redmond, 1990; Wilson & Elman, 1990). Of the qualitative studies, the insightful work conducted by David Thomas (1989, 1990, 1993) deserves special attention for its exquisite care in dealing with sensitive issues of race. Of the reviews, those of Belle Rose Ragins (1989,1996,1997) merit especially close reading for their thoroughness and intelligence on gender issues.

Only a very few academic studies have approached the topic of developmental relationships from the point of view of the senior person (Atkinson et al., 1994; Burke et al., 1993; Ragins & Cotton, 1993; Ragins & Scandura, 1994). Since the beginning, the bulk of studies on developmental relationships has looked at the topic from the angle of the protégé, and since the early 1980s, the academic studies have emphasized gender. Studies have documented which junior people seek and which have access to senior people. These studies show, by and large, that although junior women enter many more cross-gender developmental relationships than do men, there are few differences between the abilities of women and men to find mentors, sponsors, and role models (see O’Neill, Horton, & Crosby, chap. 4, this volume; Ragins, 1996). About the consequences of developmental relationships, the news for the junior person appears to be consistently positive. On the whole, despite early worries to the contrary (Noe, 1988; Olson & Ashton-Jones, 1992; Ragins, 1989), women derive as much measurable benefit as men from being sponsored or mentored.

Much less is known from the academic studies about ethnicity or race than about gender (see Blake, chap. 5, this volume; Bowman, Kite, Branscombe, & Williams, chap. 2, this volume; Goto, chap. 3, this volume; Kirby & Jackson, chap. 8, this volume). The vast majority of studies that specify the race or ethnicity of the participants contain a preponderance of Whites among the protégés. If most of junior people in the studies are White, so are virtually all the senior people. Indeed, it is really only now that mainstream scholars, so long focused on gender, have begun to ackn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• I: Theoretical Perspectives
• II: Empirical Perspectives
• III: Experiential Perspectives
• IV: Conclusions