| While mentoring relationships are widely recognized as instrumental for facilitating individual learning and growth, informal mentoring relationships are often difficult to initiate and maintain. As such, organizations are increasingly implementing formal mentoring programs to improve the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their employees. Proteges who are more motivated should invest more effort into the program and consequently, perceive the formal mentoring as more effective. Using data from a formal mentoring program in a global manufacturing organization based in the Midwestern United States, this dissertation investigates the relationships between four factors that should motivate a protege to invest more effort into a formal mentorship (recruitment source, scope of mentoring objectives sought, protege job performance prior to requesting a mentor, protege gender), thus increasing the formal mentoring effectiveness. Multiple measures of formal mentoring effectiveness were used, including both perceptual (satisfaction with mentor, satisfaction with the mentoring process, value derived) and more objective measures (e.g., project cost savings and project time savings).;Motivation for requesting a mentor was the most valuable predictor of formal mentoring effectiveness. Recruitment source was the next best predictor, although the relationship was in the opposite direction than hypothesized. Proteges who learned about the formal mentoring program through a formal information source reported marginally higher formal mentoring effectiveness as measured by satisfaction with mentor, satisfaction with the mentoring process, project cost savings, and the value derived from mentoring when compared to those who learned about it from an informal source. Contrary to expectations, those who had higher performance ratings prior to mentoring reported higher project cost savings as a result of formal mentoring. However, performance rating prior to mentoring was not related to any of the other measures of formal mentoring effectiveness. Lastly, female proteges were marginally more satisfied with the mentoring process, yet reported less cost savings than their male counterparts. Suggestions for future research and implications for practitioners are also provided. |
