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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.

As proposed in this paper, in public accounting firms, supervisors and managers provide junior accountants with career-related benefits that include: career development support; social support; and role modeling. Also, employees who receive such career-related benefits are more likely to believe that the firm provides career growth opportunities and more likely to trust their managers. Career growth opportunities and trust, in turn, positively affect organizational commitment, which reduces turnover intentions. In summary, the relation between career benefits and turnover is mediated by several variables: career growth opportunities, trust in managers, and organizational commitment. Results of a survey of junior employees in public accounting firms support these assertions (with the exception of social support).

The alta mentoring platform, launched within the aviation and aerospace industry in 2019, is the outcome of a joint knowledge exchange project between academics and industry. It was designed and launched to meet the mentoring needs of women in this male dominated industry, who otherwise had no, or very little, mentoring support. The aim of alta was to create an on-line mentoring platform that was based upon the mentoring support that women identified as being important and that would address their under-representation and the lack of support for career progression. The chapter draws upon a body of literature focussing upon mentoring, specifically its meanings (see Dashper, 2018), benefits (see Phillips et al., 2016) and barriers (see Eby et al., 2010); as well as gender specific mentoring (see Johns & McNamara, 2014). The authors adopt a feminist relational mentoring framework (Ragins, 2016), that views mentoring as a two-way process where mentors and mentees learn from each other. The project was under-pinned by six months of research across the industry (a survey, interviews and focus groups with professional women and employers) to ascertain the need for the mentoring platform. This chapter is based upon four focus groups held with women across the industry, in both technical and middle/senior managerial roles, to ascertain their experiences of mentoring and their perceived and experienced benefits and barriers to mentoring. The focus groups were also utilised to find out specifically what women wanted from the alta mentoring platform and their views on its women-only focus.

Scanning both the academic and popular business literature of the last 40 years puzzles the alert reader. The variety of prescriptions of how to be successful (effective, performing, etc.) 1 Organizational performance, organizational success and organizational effectiveness will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.1 in business is hardly comprehensible: “Being close to the customer,” Total Quality Management, corporate social responsibility, shareholder value maximization, efficient consumer response, management reward systems or employee involvement programs are but a few of the slogans introduced as means to increase organizational effectiveness. Management scholars have made little effort to integrate the various performance-enhancing strategies or to assess them in an orderly manner.

This study classifies organizational strategies by the importance each strategy attaches to different constituencies in the firm’s environment. A number of researchers divide an organization’s environment into various constituency groups and argue that these groups constitute – as providers and recipients of resources – the basis for organizational survival and well-being. Some theoretical schools argue for the foremost importance of responsiveness to certain constituencies while stakeholder theory calls for a – situation-contingent – balance in these responsiveness levels. Given that maximum responsiveness levels to different groups may be limited by an organization’s resource endowment or even counterbalanced, the need exists for a concurrent assessment of these competing claims by jointly evaluating the effect of the respective behaviors towards constituencies on performance. Thus, this study investigates the competing merits of implementing alternative business philosophies (e.g. balanced versus focused responsiveness to constituencies). Such a concurrent assessment provides a “critical test” of multiple, opposing theories rather than testing the merits of one theory (Carlsmith, Ellsworth & Aronson, 1976).

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.