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This exploratory study investigates how mentoring is perceived and undertaken by the concerned parties, namely, mentor and protégé, and organizations in the context of Thailand.

A qualitative approach using dyadic case studies (of manager and subordinates) was taken to reflect whether mentoring is formally established in Thai business organizations, what benefits are experienced by mentors and mentees (protégés) and how the Thai business organizations can fully benefit from mentoring system. Based on the sample case studies, it is found that mentoring is perceived as teaching and advising how to perform a job well and mainly by one's supervisor. Factors that influence the effectiveness of mentoring system include clear organizational policies, HRM practices (i.e. orientation, training and development, performance appraisal, rewards, etc.), mentoring evaluation, trust and integrity and perceived risk.

Research on mentorship has been dominated by the West and little is known about the cultural variations of the mentoring phenomenon in Asian countries. A richer understanding of the cultural context that is more attuned to mentoring experience in Asia can help to improve workplace experience, in general, for those working in and for those who intend to work in the region. This chapter captures the important theoretical lenses in the mentoring literature, and also provides a clear demarcation between negative mentoring and dysfunctional mentoring. This is followed by contextualizing mentoring as per four of Hofstede's six cultural dimensions by dwelling on mentoring experience in countries such as China, India, Pakistan, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. It is hoped that this chapter will pave the way for further research, which may be a precursor for theory development.

This paper proposes a new theoretical framework to explain enterprise unionism and conducts the first systematic comparative study of union structure in nine Asian countries. Our framework emphasizes political dynamics and the role of the state in labor relations and argues that the initial period of the collective bargaining era constituted a critical juncture (state labor policy) that occurred in distinctive ways in different countries and that these differences played a central role in shaping the different union structures in the following decades. The nine countries are mainly divided into three groups, depending on the type of state labor policy: enforcement of enterprise unionism; centralization/laissez-faire (non-enterprise unionism); and dual unionism/gradual transition (middle-ground). Governmental data were used for the study. A clear correspondence between state labor policy and union structure in each of these groups was found. We believe that our framework significantly enhances our understanding of the Asian cases. Future research should explore the validity of the proposed framework through comparative studies of Latin American cases where enterprise unions have also been observed.