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This special issue seeks to examine mentoring relationships and offer new perspectives and frameworks, suggesting exciting avenues for future research on mentoring and career development.

In the last two decades, the workplace has been dramatically transformed. Individuals traditionally had careers entrenched in organizations, relying on the paternalistic firm for career development. Increasingly now, individuals are enacting careers outside organizational boundaries, defining career success on their own terms rather than by the organizational measures of salary and rank. Rapid technological change and globalization have intensified the decoupling of individual careers from organizations, putting more emphasis on individuals for their own career development and creating an even greater need for mentoring.

Although much research has been done on the impact of mentoring on subjective and objective career success, there are still many unexamined and under‐explored aspects of mentoring. This collection of ten articles tackles some of these areas, providing new insights and offering new avenues for research and practice.

These articles are authored by individuals from a variety of disciplines (e.g. organizational behavior, psychology, health care), and countries (e.g. USA, UK, Nigeria), with each article bringing a unique lens to the study of mentoring and careers. Individually, each article makes a contribution to the better understanding of how mentoring has evolved and is enacted today. Together, this collection of articles provides important insights that it is hoped encourage even further research into the complexities of developmental relationships and their impact on career development.

Organizations have become increasingly interested in developing their human resources. One tool that has been explored in this quest is mentoring. This has led to a surge in mentoring research and an increase in the number of formal mentoring programs implemented in organizations. This review provides a survey of the empirical work on mentoring that is organized around the major questions that have been investigated. Then a conceptual model, focused on formal mentoring relationships, is developed to help understand the mentoring process. The model draws upon research from a diverse body of literature, including interpersonal relationships, career success, training and development, and informal mentoring. Finally, a discussion of critical next steps for research in the mentoring domain is presented.

This study seeks to examine the role of informal mentoring in career success in an African work environment.

Data were collected from 510 first‐line bank managers through a survey of ten banks in four central business districts of Lagos State, Nigeria.

Results of hierarchical regression analysis revealed that informal mentoring accounts for a significant proportion of the variance (β=0.64, p<0.01) in career success. Informal mentoring increased R² from 0.06 to 0.41 (p<0.01), indicating a significant change in R² (ΔR²=0.35, p<0.01).

The findings are based on self‐report measures from respondents in the banking sector. This underscores the need for further research with objective measures from a wider domain.

An intervention is needed to make informal mentoring thrive, enhance its quality and ensure career success.

There is a paucity of literature relating mentoring to career success in the Nigerian and, indeed, the African work environment. This study addresses this gap in literature and corrects the inappropriateness of generalising from foreign cultures to the Nigerian society.

Although studies have improved understanding of the relation between external career mentoring and mentor work outcomes, an important question remains regarding whether this mentoring function influences mentor turnover intentions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of career mentoring outside the workplace on mentor turnover intentions.

Data were collected from 101 working business professionals in the southeastern USA at two points in time who provided career mentoring to business student protégés in an eight-month university sponsored mentoring program.

As hypothesized, moderated mediation analysis indicated that amount of external career mentoring negatively related to mentor turnover intentions and that the indirect effect of external career mentoring on mentor turnover intentions via mentor work engagement was stronger when both mentor protégé satisfaction and meeting frequency were high vs low. A two-way interaction revealed that mentors reporting higher protégé satisfaction had lower turnover intentions when meeting frequency was high vs low.

The findings help clarify the external career mentoring and mentor turnover intentions relation and have valuable theoretical implications for research on the benefits external mentoring can provide mentors. They also have practical implications for using external mentoring to enhance mentor work engagement and reduce mentor turnover intentions.

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.

This study seeks to examine the impact of career growth prospect (CGP) and formal mentoring support (FMS) on overall organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and its five dimensions.

Data were obtained from 72 supervisors and 182 of their subordinates in branches of a bank located in a city in South‐western Nigeria.

Results indicate that CGP accounted for a significant percentage of the variance in overall OCB (β=0.46, p<0.001), predicting three dimensions: sportsmanship, conscientiousness and civic virtue. Contrary to hypothesis, FMS did not predict overall OCB, but significantly influenced three OCB dimensions: sportsmanship, courtesy and altruism, predicting “sportsmanship” (β=0.26, p<0.001) to be better than CGP (β=0.22, p<0.01).

Although generalisation is limited in a study of a single organisation, the findings of the study imply that CGP and FMS have differential relevance in OCB.

Altering negative perceptions of CGP among employees engenders OCB but FMS needs to be complemented with other interventions to foster overall OCB.

Although career growth prospects and formal mentoring support are projected to foster OCB in the Nigerian banking sector, no research has investigated this expectation. The extant literature shows that research on the impact of career growth prospects on OCB is virtually absent. Again, the absence of African perspectives on research issues such as OCB, has limited comparative studies and the global scope of most reference journals. This study narrows these gaps in literature and contributes empirical information that equips management to deal more strategically with the integrated approach to OCB.

This paper aims to present a literature review to examine the career development outcomes on practicing engineering novices who are being mentored at work, and factors of mentoring that contribute to those career development outcomes.

Through a meta-synthesis, the research premises and findings of 12 articles identified through a systematic search of nine databases were examined and synthesized, to identify the most common career development outcomes and the most influential factors contributing to these outcomes.

The most common contributing factors were found to be job characteristics, career development mentoring support, psychosocial mentoring support and mentoring methods. The most frequent career outcomes were career satisfaction and promotion.

The sample consisted of only 12 articles; however, according to the guidelines of meta-synthesis and Critical Appraisal Skills Program (CASP), the sample size was ideal. Further, articles were all of high or very high quality, and, in all studies, multiple contributing factors were measured to investigate the relationships among those factors and career outcomes. The factors and outcomes can be considered by researchers as study variables in future studies.

Organizations and practitioners can use factors that influence mentoring outcomes and the mentoring outcomes found in this study to develop more effective mentoring programs.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic review of prior research regarding mentoring for practicing engineers. This paper allows researchers and practitioners to identify key findings and trends in past works, recognize research gaps and propose future research directions.

This article aims to examine the process of mentoring and career development within the global arena. Although much has been written on the adjustment of expatriates, relatively little research has examined the exchange of information and knowledge among workers in different countries via the mentoring process.

A model is offered of how an expatriate progresses through learning cycles aided by multiple mentors. Multiple mentoring contributes to the individual's career development and facilitates the development of organizational tacit and embedded knowledge.

Using Hall and Chandler's conceptualization of multiple learning cycles over the life span, it is proposed that the expatriate cycles through a learning cycle over the course of an extended assignment. These learning cycles are shorter than the traditional career stages, often lasting two to four years – similar to the length of an expatriate assignment. It is suggested that the stages of an expatriate assignment – predeparture, on‐site and repatriation – represent a learning cycle. A successful expatriate experience is more likely to occur if multiple mentors in various locations are available – as needed – to offer information and career support to the expatriate.

With increasing globalization and rapid technological advances, mentoring relationships that cross national and other types of boundaries have increased, yet theory has not kept pace. A framework is provided for the further examination of expatriate careers and how mentoring can increase career outcomes and knowledge transfer.

The purpose of this paper is to understand faculty mentoring experiences across career stages and the influence of mentoring relationship quality on job satisfaction. The study participants were faculty members from a consortium of liberal arts colleges in the USA. The theoretical lens draws from scholarship on career stages, developmental networks, and working alliances.

The analysis is based on a subset of 415 faculty member responses about mentoring from a larger data set on faculty development. The online survey was conducted in Spring 2014. Frequencies, χ², regression equations, and confirmatory factor analysis were computed using R statistical software.

Over half the faculty members were both mentors and protégés; although, a sizable minority of faculty members did not engage in mentoring. Early-career faculty members were significantly more likely to have a mentor than were mid- or late-career faculty members. For both mentors and protégés, the higher they rated the quality of the mentoring relationship, the more job satisfaction they reported; this finding was greatest for mid-career (associate rank) faculty members. Participants reported significantly higher relationship quality with their mentors than with their protégés.

The results may not generalize to faculty members who work at other institution types, for example, research-intensive or two-year schools, or to non-US higher education contexts. Statements made regarding those who do not participate in mentoring are speculative on the part of the authors.

Institutions may need to develop support for faculty members who may not desire to engage in mentoring. More attention may be warranted to create individual and institutional supports focused on high-quality mentoring.

This study extends the literature on mentoring by establishing that many employees serve in mentor and protégé roles simultaneously. Further, employees engage in mentoring relationships across career stages as mentors and as protégés. The authors developed a reliable measure of mentoring relationship quality that may be used in future mentoring studies. Higher quality mentoring relationships were associated with significantly greater job satisfaction.

This paper assesses the incidence and contribution that mentoring has to the career development of retail managers. Previous research has identified the benefits that mentoring relationships have for the protégé, the mentor and the organisation, although none have compared the experiences and attitudes towards mentoring within the retail environment. Drawing on a sample of 132 UK retail managers, this research found that half the sample had experienced being a protégé in a mentoring relationship. No significant differences were found between a respondent’s sex, age, position in the organisation and whether they have been mentored. Mentoring was found to play an important role in the development of a protégé’s current job, career and self development. It was less apparent whether the incidence of mentoring affected retail managers’ ultimate career ambitions. However, it appears that the advantages of mentoring as a management development tool far outweigh any disadvantages for the protégé.