Prelims

Half Title Page

Mentorship-driven Talent Management

Endorsements

To date, studies of cultural differences between Western and Eastern models of mentoring have been sporadic. Payal Kumar and Pawan Budhwar have assembled eleven substantive chapters in which authors offer unique organizational case studies, as well as qualitative and quantitative studies of mentoring relationships in countries including India, Thailand, China, Japan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh. This is a ‘must read’ for scholars and practitioners who claim to be experts on mentoring in a global context.

Dr Kathy E. Kram Shipley Professor in Management Emerita Boston University Questrom School of Business, USA

Although mentoring is a critical developmental relationship, the field has been constrained by Euro-Western approaches and ideologies. This fine volume offers mentoring scholars needed insights into the unique experiences of mentoring within Asian contexts.

Dr Belle Rose Ragins Sheldon B Lubar Professor of Management University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

Asian societies are high power distance in nature. I am delighted that Professors Kumar and Budhwar focus their book on mentoring in Asia, where respect and reverence are the norms and mentoring is much more than offering advance on career development. This edited volume offers unique insights into mentoring relationships across several Asian countries.

Dr Eddy Ng James and Elizabeth Freeman Professor of Management Bucknell University, Canada

This book unravels the dynamics of mentoring across various Asian cultures, from academic and practitioner perspectives. It brings to the fore contexts that have so far been given scant visibility in mentoring research. As such, the book brings fresh ideas and perspectives to developmental relationships, thereby validating, questioning, challenging and importantly putting in context the existing theories and frameworks of mentoring.

Dr Aarti Ramaswami Deputy Dean ESSEC Asia-Pacific ESSEC Business School, Asia-Pacific, Singapore

Title Page

Mentorship-driven Talent Management: The Asian Experience

Edited by

Payal Kumar

BML Munjal University, India

Pawan Budhwar

Aston University, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2020

© Selection and editorial matter of the Work © Editors, chapters © their respective authors, 2020. Published by Emerald Publishing under an exclusive licence.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78973-692-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78973-691-5 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78973-693-9 (Epub)

Dedications

To Professors Stacy Blakebeard, Simmons College (USA) – a friend and a trusted mentor, and Manish Singhal, XLRI (India) – thesis advisor and mentor (Payal Kumar)

To Professors Paul Sparrow, RD Pathak and Michael West (Pawan Budhwar)

To all those who believe in the significance of mentoring in present-day organizations.

About the Contributors

Sujana Adapa, Associate Professor, principally teaches Marketing units in the UNE Business School. But, her research expertise covers both Marketing and Management areas. Her research interests include information and technology adoption, sustainable practices, gender studies covering leadership and entrepreneurship.

Hassan Abu Bakar is an Associate Professor in the Othman Yeop Abdullah Graduate School of Business, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia. His main research interests are in dyadic communication in the workplace, leadership style, organizational communication and intercultural communication.

Pawan Budhwar is the 50th Anniversary Professor of International HRM at Aston Business School. He is also the Associate Pro-Vice Chancellor International, the Director of India Centre at Aston University and the Co-Editor-in-Chief of British Journal of Management. Pawan's research interests are in the fields of strategic HRM, International HRM and emerging markets with a specific focus on India. He has published over 120 articles in leading journals and has also written and/or co-edited 20 books. Pawan is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, British Academy of Management, the Academy of Social Sciences and the Indian Academy of Management.

Haixiao Chen is a PhD candidate in the College of Business at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His research interests include ethics, mentoring, leadership and work–family issues.

Fabian Jintae Froese is Chair Professor of Human Resource Management and Asian Business at the University of Goettingen, Germany, and editor-in-chief of Asian Business & Management. Previously, he was a Professor of International Business at Korea University in Seoul, Korea. He obtained a doctorate in international management from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and another doctorate in sociology from Waseda University, Japan. His research interests lie in expatriation, diversity and talent management. His work has been published in refereed journals such as Academy of Management Learning & Education, British Journal of Management, Human Resource Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior and Journal of World Business. For his research he has received numerous best paper awards from the Academy of Management, Academy of International Business, Association of Japanese Business Studies, and European Academy of Management in recent years.

Masaki Hosomi is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Commerce and Management, Kansai University, Japan. He obtained a doctorate in management from Osaka University, Japan. His research interests are related to the field of work and organizational psychology, and human resource management, including work–life balance, telework, work–family interface, work engagement and job crafting. He currently serves as the Chairperson of Western-Japanese Division of Japanese Association of Administrative Science. His work has been published in refereed journals such as Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, the Japanese Journal of Labor Studies and Japan Journal of Administrative Science. He wrote Wakuraifu baransu wo jitsugen suru shokuba: Misugosarete kita joshi doryo no shiten [Workplace for work-life balance: From an overlooked viewpoint of the boss and the colleague] (Osaka University Press).

Mian Imran ul Haq studied English Literature and Mass Communication and served as lecturer initially. Mr Haq is pursuing research work to complete his doctoral thesis from the Department of Media Studies, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He has been serving the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics as Senior Publications Officer since 2010.

Muhammad Zahid Iqbal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management Sciences, COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan. He holds a PhD in Human Resource Development from the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan, and a Post Doctorate from the University of Liverpool Management School, Liverpool, United Kingdom.

Nimruji Jammulamadaka is an Professor at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Her research interests include post- and decolonial management studies, power, social sector, CSR, innovation and research methods. Her recent books are Indian Business: Notions and Practices of Responsibility (Routledge); Governance, Resistance and the Post-colonial State: Management and State Building (Routledge); and Workers and Margins: Understanding Erasures and Possibilities (Palgrave). She is also the co-editor of the book series Managing the Post-colony (Springer). She serves on the editorial boards of Organization, Journal of Management History and Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management. She has served as the Chair of the Critical Management Studies Division of the Academy of Management.

Payal Kumar is Professor and Chair HR/OB, Head of Research and International Collaborations, BML Munjal University, Gurgaon, India. As a business leader, Payal has the rich, practical experience of mentoring managers. As a scholar, she has published journal papers and books on mentorship, following her thesis on Examining the Outcomes of Mentor–Protégé Personality Congruence and the Mediating Role of Affect. Payal is also the series editor of the Palgrave Studies in Leadership and Followership.

Ho Kwong Kwan is an Associate Professor of Management in the Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management Department at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). His research interests include mentoring, leadership, deviant behaviours and work–family issues.

Miaomiao Li is a PhD candidate in the School of Economics and Management at Tongji University. Her research interests include mentoring and deviant behaviours.

Marlin Marissa Malek Abdul Malek is an Associate Professor at Othman Yeop Abdullah Graduate School of Business, Universiti Utara Malaysia. Her main research interests are in female leaders, cross-cultural management and generational differences.

Dr Farzana Nahid is Assistant Professor Department of Marketing and International Business School of Business and Economics (SBE) Room: NAC 734 (1), Level: 07 North South University 15, Bashundhara R/A, Dhaka 1229, Bangladesh.

Patarakhuan Pila-Ngarm is currently a lecturer in management at the Faculty of Business Administration and Accountancy at Khon Kaen University, Thailand. She earned her PhD from Asian Institute of Technology in 2016. She has taught organizational behaviour, small and medium enterprise management, entrepreneurship and principle of management. Her areas of research interests include the organizational behaviour in SMEs. Much of her work has been on improving the understanding of human capital, SMEs, human resource management and performance management. She can be reached at: ppattar@kku.ac.th.

Tomoki Sekiguchi is Professor at the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University. He received his PhD from the University of Washington. His research interests centre around employee behaviours, person–environment fit, cross-cultural organizational behaviour and international human resource management. He currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Applied Psychology: An International Review and Associate Editor of Asian Business & Management. He is President of Euro-Asia Management Studies Association (EAMSA) and is Vice President of the Association of Japanese Business Studies (AJBS). His work has been published in such journals as Personnel Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the Journal of World Business, Asia Pacific Journal of Management and the International Journal of Human Resource Management. He has written several chapters in books, including Routledge handbook of human resource management in Asia, Handbook of employee selection, Oxford handbook of organizational citizenship behavior and Challenges of human resource management in Japan.

Alison Sheridan is a Professor of Management at the UNE Business School, University of New England, Australia. Her research interests span gender and human resource management, corporate governance and regional development. She has published widely in these areas, including a co-edited book with Dr Sujana Adapa, Inclusive Leadership; Negotiating Gendered Spaces, which examines inclusivity in organizations and workplaces.

Damita Lachman Sherwani is a Masters of Commerce student, specializing in Human Resource Management, at the University of Western Australia. She majored in Human Resource Management in her undergraduate study at Edith Cowan University and has research interests in organizational behaviour as well as culture and employee engagement.

Sununta Siengthai was promoted to a full professor of HRM and OB at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand in 2014. Currently, retired and served as an Adjunct Faculty of the Asian Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. in Labor and Industrial Relations from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. She has taught, researched and published on HRM and HRD, OB, performance management and industrial relations in the new economy. She can be reached at: sununta.siengthai@gmail.com.

Monthon Sorakraikitikul is a lecturer at Thammasat Business School, Thammasat University, Thailand. He teaches human resource development and organizational development. He earned his PhD from the Asian Institute of Technology in 2014. His dissertation focused on organization learning capability and workplace spirituality. He is also certified with WIAL Action Learning Coach and Gallup Strengths coach. He can be reached at: monthon.sor@gmail.com.

Ely Susanto is a lecturer at Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. His current research interests include public service motivation, innovative work behaviour and conflict management. He has published in several journals, including in the Journal of Applied Psychology, International Journal of Human Resource Management and International Journal of Conflict Management.

Yuliani Suseno is an Associate Professor and the Assistant Dean of Research Training at the Faculty of Business and Law, the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include social capital, international HRM, and innovative work behaviour. She has published in several journals, including in the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Australian Journal of Public Administration, Information Technology & People, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources, Asia Pacific Business Review, Journal of Organizational Change Management, and Employee Relations.

Jasmin Waldmann is a life transformation expert. Ms Waldmann is a goal-oriented, multi-faceted woman with certifications in sports and health training, Neuro-linguistic programming, and expertise in mind-and-body holistic coaching, meditation, wellness, Life Coaching, and self-leadership. She started her entrepreneurial journey in 2008. However, since coming to India in 2012 as part of a promotional campaign for a sports brand, her mission has been to guide and inspire corporate men and women, managers, athletes, housewives, teachers and entrepreneurs to find the ideal balance of mind, body and soul and become their successful best. She is also the author of Change Me, which captures in detail a common man's inspiring journey towards holistic fitness with the help of a life coach.

Xiaofeng Xu is a PhD candidate in the School of Economics and Management at Tongji University. Her research interests include mentoring, leadership and deviant behaviours.

Dr Subba Reddy Yarram is a Senior Lecturer in Finance in the UNE Business School at the University of New England. He primarily teaches Finance units in the UNE Business School. His research covers corporate governance and small business economics/management. His research has been published in reputed journals including Economic Modelling, Managerial Finance and International Journal of Managerial Finance.

Foreword

As I write this Foreword, I come straight from a meeting of senior coaches in Africa. The subject? How to escape from the cultural dominance by Western society of the concepts, theories and overall debate around coaching and mentoring. It's a discussion I frequently find across the Asian region, too. While the words coach and mentor have their origins in Europe and have been given radically different interpretations from these origins in the United States in recent decades, the principles that underpin developmental dialogue belong to many cultures and often find their richest expression in the Asian region, from the gurus of India, to the Buddhist traditions of the Himalayan kingdoms, Southeast Asia and Japan.

In my recent travels in Central Asia, I was struck by the impact of medieval scholars, such as the astronomer Ulum Beg, grandson of Tamerlane, who stimulated learning as a way of life. A recurrent theme I observe in all the Asian cultures I have engaged with – brought home in particular in dialogue with monks in Laos and Myanmar – is that knowledge and self-knowledge are inseparable in creating a whole person. This is also the core of mentoring: by raising the level of self-awareness and awareness of the world around us, we are able to have powerful learning dialogues that link these worlds.

This diffusion of conceptual bases for mentoring is both a strength (in that people throughout the region can immediately associate with the core principles of listening, questioning and reflection) and a weakness because it opens the door for imposed definitions from other cultures. The word ‘mentoring’ is a relatively recent creation from the Anglo-Saxon world. The word ‘mentor’ comes from a character in The Odyssey. Although a dictionary definition of mentor is ‘a wise man’, the old man Mentor was by and large an incompetent. I am struck by the similarities with Nasiruddin, the wise fool of Central Asian culture. The ‘real’ mentor was Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, who allowed Odysseus to make mistakes, then sat with him to help him reflect and learn from his experiences. In effect, she used her wisdom to help him become wiser in turn. This role has much in common with that of a sage or guru in Asian cultures.

Athena had multiple personalities, resulting from the merging of many gods into one. In her role as Goddess of Martial Arts she was a brutal, vengeful bringer of retribution. US scholars in the 1960s and 1970s failed to appreciate the subtlety of these contrasting personae and lumped them into one. The result was that the mentoring role of stimulating wisdom became overshadowed by the largely incompatible role of a powerful and influential sponsor – someone, who took action on the behalf of a protégé (someone who was protected). It is interesting to note that this culturally biased interpretation of mentoring occurred at a time when the United States was pre-occupied with exercising its power and authority around the world. With cultural dominance comes the power to influence language – even in this book, which aims to be thought-liberating, some contributors refer to protégé rather than more accurate mentee (one who is helped to think).

In doing so, the US scholars also ignored the more recent history and evolution of mentoring, in which the French cleric Fenelon, appointed tutor to the son of Louis the XIV, continued the dialogues of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, with Odysseus' son, in a book titled simply Telemachus. One of the first books on leadership of modern times, and translated into many languages, it established the principles of reflective dialogue as the key to developing wise leaders.

In co-editing the book Coaching and Mentoring in Asia-Pacific – a project designed to illustrate the diversity of indigenous approaches within the region – my respect for the insights to be gained from Asian perspectives (in all their diversity) has deepened. For example, while I have researched and written on the role of laughter in learning dialogue, I had never comprehended the complexity of smiling as a vehicle to steer the conversation, until introduced to the concepts by a colleague in Thailand, where subtle variations in smiling may convey multiple meanings.

Engaging with other cultural traditions reveals that mentoring and coaching are complex, multi-faceted constructions heavily influenced by local traditions and cultural assumptions. For example:

• Many Asian cultures have a built-in reverence for age that both encourages people to seek to explore issues with someone older and wiser and at the same time inhibits open challenge from the younger person to the older. Good mentoring practice in Asia-Pacific therefore involves encouraging the younger person to challenge themselves. In contrast, there is an implicit assumption in much of Western mentoring that the mentor (or coach) does the challenging. My own practice has been enriched by recognizing that I have a choice in which of these routes I take.

• The simplistic Goal, Reality, Options and Will model popularized in Western coaching and often advocated in mentoring starts from the assumption that the person seeking help knows what they want and simply needs support in how to get there. One of the reasons GROW has been discredited is that effective coaching and mentoring result in changes of perception and identity that substantially change the person's goals – so rigid pursuit of an initial goal is both pointless and potentially harmful. By contrast, one of my Chinese supervisees brought to me the case of a client, who typifies a perspective found commonly in the region. The client begins the learning dialogue by describing, bit by bit, the circumstances and context of an issue not yet defined. Working round it, meandering through the landscape of the issue, the client and the mentor both develop insights into the multiple systems in play. By the time the issue clarifies into a goal, the choices and decisions to be made are already evident. There are pluses and minuses with both of these approaches, but I conclude that the greatest value lies in being able to step outside the rigidity of a single, culturally bounded approach and work with wherever the client is coming from.

***

It is heartening to see the chapters in this pioneering volume present a diversity of national and cultural perspectives along with a range of applications. This edited volume has been divided into three themes: country reviews, perspectives and case studies (which will be useful to use in teaching purposes). The country reviews of Indonesia, Japan and Thailand (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) are important stepping stones towards creating and valuing national identities for mentoring. Gender-based mentoring and reverse mentoring (Chapters 6 and 8, studies from Malaysia and India) have emerged as major forces for social change. Other chapters emphasize issues that are of particular significance in an Asian economic context – for example, Chapter 9 explores mentoring in the context of family businesses in Bangladesh, a relatively unexplored theme in the Western world. Other countries that are covered are China and Pakistan. There is an also an interesting perspective of the challenges in India faced by a female European coach.

For a mentor or mentor trainer in Asia, it cannot be healthy to allow their practice to be defined solely by cultural assumptions from the West – not least, because so much ‘good practice’ can be challenged on the basis of lack of evidence. For example, the notion that coaches and mentors should take copious notes flies in the face of all the evidence from research into attentiveness and neuroscience. (It also puts the power of the relationship firmly in the hands of the mentor, not the mentee.)

One of the reasons for the sudden rapid emergence of an Asia-Pacific chapter of the European Coaching and Mentoring Council is pushback by serious practitioners against formulaic approaches to accreditation and standards by the largest of the global professional bodies in the field. ¹ The great danger with standardization at a global level is that it marginalizes the majority of cultures, expecting them to conform to the mores of one or two dominant cultures. Contextual differences are there and need to be acknowledged and respected.

Equally, it cannot be healthy for Western mentors and coaches, or the research communities built around them, to ignore the wealth of insights into learning dialogue from other cultures, nor to discount the value of diversity of approach. Indeed, not to do so is a negation of two of the core principles of mentoring – curiosity about other world views, seeking diverse perceptions that open up different choices.

Hence the importance of this book. It is not enough just to challenge the cultural dominance of coaching and mentoring by the West, which is what I have been saying for long (Clutterbuck, Kochan, Lunsford, Domínguez, & Haddock-Millar, 2017). It is equally important to engage in dialogue that can benefit mentoring practice in all parts of the world. This edited volume – the first of its kind – does just that. Kudos to the volume editors Prof. Payal Kumar and Prof. Pawan Budhwar for taking the pains to bring out this volume on Asian mentoring experiences. In effective mentoring, all parties learn. Indeed, one of the most accurate measures of mentoring quality is how much of a learning exchange has taken place. It is, in my view, imperative that we maintain this principle of collaborative learning across cultures in the development of mentoring practice, in accreditation, in research and in how we build the global mentoring community. Anything less would be hypocritical!

David Clutterbuck, July 2019

Professor Clutterbuck, a leading global authority on coaching and mentoring, has authored 70 books. He is the Special Ambassador, European Mentoring and Coaching Council; and Visiting Professor, Henley Business School, UK.