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The purpose of this study is to explore the different contributions of work and non‐work relationships that comprise individuals' developmental networks to career success.

A multi‐method approach provides a rich understanding of how work and non‐work developmental relationships combine to support individuals' careers. Survey data were analyzed from 254 working adults who were also part‐time MBA students. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 37 participants.

Quantitative results indicate that non‐work developers provide more overall support than work developers. Support from non‐work developers is positively associated with career satisfaction and life satisfaction. In contrast, support from work developers is positively associated with salary level and career satisfaction. Qualitative data indicate differences in the sub‐functions and quality of support offered by work versus non‐work relationships, particularly in terms of role modeling.

Developmental relationships from different domains emphasize different sub‐functions of support and differentially affect career outcomes. While broad functions – career support, psychosocial support, and role modeling – are identifiable across domains, non‐work relationships provide some distinct sub‐functions from work relationships.

Practicing managers should develop and maintain developmental networks that extend beyond the boundaries of their current organization. Human resource professionals will want to consider how well their initiatives encourage individuals to enlist a variety of potential developers into their networks.

The findings indicate that non‐work relationships are a critical part of developmental networks and individuals' career success.

Purpose – This paper seeks to examine the relationship between individuals' developmental mentoring networks and a subjective career outcome, clarity of professional identity. How developmental network characteristics are related to professional identity over time is explored. Design/methodology/approach – This is a three‐wave, longitudinal survey study, covering a five‐year span (1996‐2001). The participants (n=136), full‐time MBA students at the inception of the study, provided complete developmental network data on each survey. The relationships between clarity of professional identity and three different measures of developmental network density were explored: early‐career density; general density; and density dynamics (e.g. the change in density over time). Findings – Developmental network density, which reflects the professional identity exploration process, is negatively related to clarity of professional identity. Research limitations/implications – The study is limited by the use of graduating MBA students from a single, top‐20 business school as participants. Practical implications – The findings suggest that people might be able to improve their careers through changing their developmental networks, particularly during their early‐career years. Originality/value – This paper provides novel insights to the mentoring, identity, and careers literatures. Given the previously uncharted territory of understanding the dynamics of developmental networks and its relationship to career outcomes, this study opens avenues for future research, while also answering questions about developmental networks and the ways they function over time.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the changing of institutional logics in an established field shapes the developmental networks of high‐achievers.

This research combines time series analysis of more than 80 years of historical data (1922‐2004) with qualitative analysis of induction speeches of 99 hall of fame players from the same period.

Findings indicate that a change in field logics from a more staid “insular” logic to a market or more business‐oriented logic coincided with changes in key players' developmental networks. In particular, the key players' self‐identified developmental relationships become both more numerous and more diverse in nature. Results of the time series analysis connect the shift in logic with the late 1950s which was an important time in Major League Baseball's history. It was during this period that, for the first time, each team had at least one African American player on their roster and each team had an average of at least one full‐time scout based in a country outside the USA – both indicators of MLB's increasingly global search for talent.

The study focuses on extraordinary career performers (versus all performers) in an all‐male professional sport where the nature of the sport and the number of organizations remains relatively stable over time.

These findings show how changes to industry level logics can affect individual level changes in mentoring and developmental networks. In particular, they demonstrate how organizations can create and remove potential developer roles as their respective logics change from era to era.

This is the first known study to explore the effect of macro level changes on mentoring and developmental networks at the individual level.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate scholarship on personality, mentoring, developmental relationships, and social networks in delineating how employees with particular personality characteristics are more or less likely to be involved in four types of developmental networks.

The paper reviews scholarship on personality characteristics and developmental relationships to identify a set of distinct personality characteristics proposed to be related to employees' tendencies to develop four types of developmental networks. These network types are defined based on high or low relationship strength and high or low relationship diversity in employee ties with others. We develop propositions delineating the nature of expected relationships of these personality characteristics with developmental network types.

The paper identifies five personality characteristics – interdependent/independent self‐construal, core self‐evaluations, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extroversion/introversions – and explained how each should be related to employees' tendencies to develop the four types of developmental networks. These networks have been described as opportunistic, entrepreneurial, receptive, and traditional developmental networks, based upon the strength and the diversity of network relationships.

The paper suggests that personality variables are potentially valuable for understanding how individuals develop particular types of developmental relationships, an area that deserves more research attention. It is noted that developmental relationships have been shown to be related to both employees' objective career outcomes such as promotions and salary progress, and subjective outcomes such as career and job satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate how an adult development perspective can further the understanding of developmental networks as holding environments for developing leaders confronted with challenging experiences.

The article utilizes constructive developmental theory (C‐D theory) to explore and address the implications of an adult development lens for leader development, especially as they confront complex leadership challenges that trigger anxiety.

Theoretical propositions suggest different kinds of holding behaviors (e.g. confirmation, contradiction, and continuity) necessary for enabling growth and effectiveness for leaders located in different developmental orders.

Propositions offered can guide future researchers to explore how leaders confronted with different kinds of leadership challenges sustain responsive developmental networks over time and how the developers in the leader's network coordinate to provide confirmation, contradiction, and continuity needed for leader development.

Leaders and their developers should reflect on how developmental orders may determine which types of holding behaviors are necessary for producing leader effectiveness amidst challenging leadership experiences. Organizations should provide assessment centers and appropriate training and development interventions to facilitate this reflection.

This paper demonstrates the important role that developmental relationships play in leadership effectiveness and growth over time. Individuals and organizations are urged to attend to the quality and availability of high quality developmental relationships for purposes of continuous learning and development.

This article re‐conceptualizes developmental networks as holding environments that can enable leader's growth as an adult and, hence, increase their effectiveness as leaders amidst complex leadership challenges.

This study focused on the relationship between mentoring constellations and intrinsic career success. Hierarchical regression analyses on the data of 416 female and 594 male university members showed that mentoring was positively associated with intrinsic career success (i.e., career satisfaction and intrinsic job satisfaction. Several characteristics of developmental networking appeared to be associated with intrinsic career success, e.g. size of the advice network, range, emotional intensity, frequency of the contacts, and years acquainted. Moreover, some moderating effects of gender on the relationship between mentoring constellations and intrinsic career success were found, e.g. for size of the advice network, emotional intensity, and stability of the relationship. Implications of results and directions for future research are discussed.

The paper tries to understand the needs of the international assignees across the different stages of expatriation and how different developers in the professional and non-professional sphere render support and advice through these stages.

In this paper, the authors have interviewed 20 expatriates of various nationalities and tried to understand the various needs of the expatriates across the three initial stages of an assignment.

The paper finds that four important mentors in an expatriation assignment play multiple need-based mentoring functions at various assignment stages: host country nationals (HCNs), parent country nationals, fellow expatriates and family.

This paper contributes to the literature on the need-based support rendered to expatriates during an international assignment. The paper, however, does not incorporate the perceptions of other vital stakeholders in the network and their intentions to contribute to the developmental network.

This paper lays down important practical implications for expatriates and the human resource management (HRM) professionals. This paper urges the practitioners to take a nuanced approach for developing expatriates than a generalized mentoring programme.

This study highlights the changing needs of the international assignees across the stages of an international assignment and demonstrates the important intra-organizational and extra-organizational developers such as family members in the fulfilment of these needs.

The purpose of this paper is to identify key developmental relationships for career‐spanning success and to examine relational models and support expectations associated with these relationships. The paper creates propositions associating developer‐protégé schema congruence and incongruence to relevant outcome variables.

Study 1 employed qualitative coding of developers identified in 77 hall of famer induction speeches and Study 2 used a cross‐industry survey of 425 respondents to assess the relational model and support expectations associated with the seven most highly‐cited developer roles from Study 1.

Study 1 identified these highly‐cited developer roles as a CEO, manager, work teammate, friend, spouse, parent, and unmet hero/idol. Study 2 described the expected relational models associated with these roles and found significant differences in the relational model and support expectations associated across roles.

While study 1 focused on a primarily male sample using retrospective data, it generalized and extended previous research on key developer roles for extraordinary career achievement. Based on the key findings from study 1, study 2 surveyed respondents regarding developer role expectations rather than expectations of particular developer‐protégé relationships.

These findings identify how and with whom protégés should consider initiating and fostering key developmental relationships to enhance their networks while broadening and deepening organizations' understanding of the importance of their members having a variety of organizational and non‐organizational developers.

These findings challenge the notion that developer‐protégé relationships fit a “one size fits all” reciprocal exchange motif as it is the first study to explore expectations associated with key developer relationships using relational models theory.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a provisional framework for researcher development in contexts where postgraduate research education is developing.

This is a reflective essay. The author draws out lessons from his research education initiatives in India and Malaysia spread over a decade (2003-2013). The lessons are based on favourable and unfavourable processes which affected those initiatives. The processes are then synthesised in two stages, to arrive at a provisional framework.

The framework is presented as a cyclical process blending five focal themes: identity, connections, network, skills and roles. Implementing such a process would require sustained institutional collaboration and a supportive policy environment.

Given the limited experiential basis of this reflective exercise, the framework should be considered provisional in nature. There is a need to discuss and assess the framework in other contexts.

Countries such as India and Malaysia have set ambitious targets for doctoral completion. Well-endowed scholarships have been put in place. However, doctoral programmes are still not yet widely popular. A need exists to direct policy debates towards the kinds of researchers needed and how to develop those kinds of researchers.

The paper presents a first-hand reflective account of the opportunities and constraints of research education in India and Malaysia. The exercise has produced a provisional framework for researcher development that could be adapted and assessed in other contexts.

This study of the impact of relationships on the development of practice competence in new graduates entering the workforce aims to contribute to the understanding of relational learning activities and enrich the knowledge about the overall process of learning practice skill.

This research used a qualitative interview methodology with thematic data analysis.

Findings revealed that the process of learning through relationships involved an iterative interplay between specific developer‐led teaching activities, learner‐led activities in interaction with others, and learner action and cognitive processing.

A model for the process of learning through relationships specifically for new graduates who have academic backgrounds in their fields of practice is proposed.