Mentorship under the microscope

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Components

Updated on December 21, 2023

Microscope, by University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences at flic.kr/p/hn5TJc

Earlier posts have noted some benefits of sponsorship and reverse mentoring for each of the parties involved, as well as for businesses. These benefits are more apparent for individuals than for businesses, in my opinion. Think about it for a moment, though. How do you quantify and correlate the benefits of a peer learning relationship at an organizational level? When I’ve spoken to friends and family about my internship work over the past few months, this question has usually been the conversation-killer. 🙂 It’s rather hard to fathom. But, the fact remains: businesses need to see bottom-line returns on the investments they make in mentorship programs.

Businesses need to see bottom-line returns on their investment in mentorship programs.

There have been some significant efforts made in an attempt to quantify and qualify mentorship’s impact. Chen, Watson & Hilton (2016) surveyed a wide range of mentorship measurement tools to assess how well they could be applied to nursing education. Their work seemed like a great place to start digging into the idea of measuring mentorship, since it’s recent, it’s thorough, and it takes a very broad approach to mentorship.

Chen, Watson & Hilton (2016) described mentorship in business as peer support across two domains (career development and psychosocial support) through the following behaviors/activities: sponsorship, role modelling (some view this as its own domain), exposure-and-visibility, acceptance-and-confirmation, coaching, counselling, challenging assignments, friendship and protection. After reading on the topics of sponsorship and reverse mentoring and discussing those in-depth with a few different experts within SAP, I was beginning to see a lot of overlap between the two (and their counterparts)—more on that in a future post.

Chen, Watson & Hilton (2016) reviewed 28 different studies about mentorship and compared the scales those studies used across dimensions such as psychometrics, participants, theoretical framework, target, and application. Overall, they observed little reliability in most studies’ results. This isn’t meant to imply that they weren’t valid; instead, they may have had small sample sizes, they may not have tested to reconfirm findings, they may have been subject to participant opinion, etc.

Of the 28 studies reviewed, these seemed to be the most reliable in terms of analysis and validation:

  • Global Measure of Mentoring Practices: This is a survey for protégés to indicate the extent to which their mentor has displayed specific behaviors (e.g., recommend challenging assignments, convey feelings of respect, share personal experiences). The questions are based on prior work by Noe, Whitely et al., and Kram (Dreher & Ash, 1990).
  • Ideal Mentor Scale: An evaluation of graduate students’ preferences for ideal mentor pairings based on factors grouped into categories such as friendliness, professional conduct, encouragement, agreeableness, sponsorship, counsel, teaching, and personality traits (Rose, 2003).
  • Alleman Mentoring Activities Questionnaire (AMAQ): Under this methodology, mentorship is viewed “as the highest and most complex level of functioning in people skills” (Gilbreath, Rose & Dietrich, 2008, p. 381). (I agree with this completely.) This questionnaire can be used as a self-assessment for mentors and protégés, as an assessment of either party by the other or a third party, as an assessment of good mentorship in a hypothetical situation, or even as a tool for planning and setting expectations for a future mentor-protégé relationship.
  • Principles of Adult Mentoring Inventory: An HRDQ inventory that measures mentors’ strengths and development needs relevant to six major functions (relationship emphasis, information emphasis, facilitative focus, confrontational focus, mentor model, mentee vision). As of today, the approximate costs are $12 for each inventory booklet and $60 for the facilitator packet.
  • Technology Mentor Benefits Instrument: A scale developed by Pamuk and Thompson (2009) to measure the technical, pedagogical, academic, and professional benefits for students that served as technology mentors for faculty.
  • Negative Mentoring Experience Scale: A scale designed over the course of three studies to measure mentors’ perceptions of negative experiences with their protégés, which are important to acknowledge as distinct from positive experiences (Eby et al, 2008).

Here’s a gallery showing questions from the Global Measure of Mentoring Practices, the Ideal Mentor Scale, the Technology Mentor Benefits Instrument, and the Negative Mentoring Experience Scale.

No gold standard of mentorship measurement exists.

After discussing their findings, Chen, Watson & Hilton (2016) concluded: “No gold standard of mentorship measurement exists” (p. 24). They asserted that measurement and evaluation of mentorship is still an emerging study and that more research needs to be done to pin down the psychometrics of mentorship and related behavior change.

References

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