Business Mentoring: Help or Hindrance

Abstract

In recent decades, mentoring has been identified as an important learning activity in a variety of contexts such as business corporations, schools, universities and hospitals. In this review of 151 articles relating to business mentoring, an endeavour has been made to clarify the positive and negative outcomes of mentoring programs for mentors, mentees, and business organisations. Although there was found to be a higher incidence of positive outcomes associated with mentoring programs, sufficient evidence suggested that the ‘dark side’ of mentoring does exist. In many cases where mentoring programs were reported to have negative outcomes, success appeared to have been jeopardised by lack of time, lack of training, negative attitudes of others, or poor matching of mentors and mentees