| Social networks in labor pools can affect the benefits derived by employees and organizations. Organizations can take an active role in shaping an employee's social network, and they may be able to achieve particular benefits with more certainty by doing so. This is a study of a formal assigned peer mentor program and whether it can facilitate the professional development of newly hired employees in terms of their performance and socialization. These effects may come about through multiple mechanisms; the two investigated are the transfer of human and social capital.; Two concerns are raised when reviewing past research on the outcomes of mentoring. A methodological concern is the potential for reporting bias in the identification of mentoring relationships. Unique characteristics of the mentoring program studied presently rule out this confound, mainly through the random assignment of mentors to protégés. A theoretical concern is whether mentoring relationships, especially those that are assigned, must be affirmed by protégés as either friend or advice relationships in order to be effective.; The results show that some effects of mentoring do not depend on mentor confirmation. Task knowledge, which was relatively static in the present context, was transferred in all mentorship dyads. However, other effects of mentoring depend on the confirmation of the relationship. The transfer of wage maximization knowledge, which was a more dynamic body of knowledge, was only evident in dyads in which mentors were named in the protégés friend or advice networks. Also, only in confirmed mentoring dyads did the social networks of mentors and protégés show more overlap than expected by chance or coexistence in the same social environment, demonstrating the sharing of social capital. |
