Patterns of informal mentorship in policing: A case study

Parents’ attitudes toward and experiences with seeking informal mentors for their children

The studies reported in this dissertation aimed to inform researchers studying informal workplace mentoring relationships. A mentoring relationship involves a more experienced employee (the mentor) and a less experienced employee (the protégé) for the purpose of advancing the protégé’s career. This dissertation started with an extensive literature review, which serves as a future research agenda to inspire scholars working in the field of mentoring. Several underdeveloped research areas were identified in this review. The empirical qualitative studies in this dissertation contributed to these research areas. In these studies, protégés, mentors, coupled pairs of mentors and protégés, and persons from their direct work environment were included. Important in addressing the identified shortcomings in the current literature, is the self-determination theory. This theory proposes that individuals have three basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. How these basic needs are fulfilled in the context of mentoring relationships, was an important question in this dissertation. Self-determination theory was found to serve as relevant framework for understanding mentoring processes and to get more insight into the role of need-fulfillment processes in these relationships. This dissertation shows how mentors play an important role in satisfying protégés’ needs and how protégés evaluate these need-supportive functions. This dissertation also shows the motives informal mentors may have for providing developmental support to their protégés. Last, this dissertation showed how outsiders of informal mentoring relationships perceive these relationships in their direct work context. The studies presented in this dissertation show us the importance of informal relationships and processes in organizations and how they may satisfy employees’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

This narrative study explores experiences with formal and informal mentoring through the perspectives of a fifth grade teacher, Lindsey. In her eighth year of teaching, Lindsey has participated in mentoring relationships of all types, both as a mentee and mentor. Through our dialogue, we delve deeply into informal and formal mentoring relationships from the standpoint of the same teacher, a process which has been missing from mentoring research (Desimone, Hochberg, Porter, Polikoff, Schwartz, & Johnson, 2014; JuarezTorres, Hurst, & Hurst, 2007; Klug & Salzman, 1991). As she shares her story, it is evident that she values several mentoring qualities, though trustworthiness is of the utmost importance. From her perspective, trust and mutual respect facilitate the birth of friendships that, in turn, increase the effective ness of mentoring relationships. The following chapter serves as a platform to share her story with the intent of prompting self-reflection from the reader.Mentoring relationships exist in a variety of forms, as any type of relationship can. The environment and culture in which the relationship exists can affect the dynamics and enactment of the traditionally described mentor/ mentee practices. Because of this, we are behooved to explore mentorship on an intimate level, particularly informal mentorship whose presence has been lacking in educational research. To date, very little research has been conducted on informal mentoring, and even fewer studies have been conducted that “allow simultaneous comparisons of formal and informal mentoring of the same teacher (Juarez-Torres, Hurst, & Hurst, 2007; Klug & Salzman, 1991)” (Desimone, Hochberg, Porter, Polikoff, Schwartz, & Johnson, 2014, p. 88). Given the gap in the literature, the research questions we explore in this study are as follows: (a) what are the teacher’s experiences with informal and formal mentoring as she began her teaching career; (b) how does she outline the differences between mentors and colleagues; and (c) how do the teacher’s experiences affect her personal mentoring style? This narrative study uncovers the experiences of an educator, Lindsey, in her eighth year of teaching, as she reflects upon her experiences with formal and informal mentorship, both as a mentee and a mentor. Although the authors of this paper are participant researchers, which we will explain further in the methodology section, we will sometimes refer to each other in third person (“Lindsey” and “Elizabeth”) throughout the chapter, simply to make the storytelling more fluid.

The authors examined the effects of the type of mentoring relationship and the gender composition of the relationship on mentoring functions and career outcomes reported by 352 female and 257 male protégés. Protégés of informal mentors viewed their mentors as more effective and received greater compensation than protégés of formal mentors. Protégés with informal mentors also received more career outcomes than nonmentored individuals, but no significant differences were found between nonmentored and formally mentored individuals. The gender composition of the relationship affected mentoring functions and outcomes, and protégé gender interacted with the type of relationship to affect mentoring functions.

BackgroundMentoring plays a pivotal role in workplace-based learning, especially in the medical realm. Organising a formal mentoring programme can be labor and time intensive and generally impractical in resource constrained medical schools with limited numbers of mentors. Hence, informal mentoring offers a valuable alternative, but will be more likely to be effective when mentors and protégés share similar views. It is therefore important to gain more insight into factors influencing perceptions of informal mentoring. This study aims to explore mentors and protégés’ perceptions of informal mentoring and how these vary (or not) with gender, age and the duration of the relationship.MethodWe administered an Informal Mentor Role Instrument (IMRI) to medical practitioners and academics from Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire was developed for the study from other validated instruments. It contained 39 items grouped into 7 domains: acceptance, counselling, friendship, parenting, psychological support, role modelling and sociability.ResultsA total of 103 mentors and 91 protégés completed the IMRI. Mentors had a better appreciation for the interpersonal aspects of informal mentoring than protégés, especially regarding acceptance, counselling and friendship. Moreover, being older and engaged in a longer mentoring relationship contributed to more positive perceptions of interpersonal aspects of mentoring, regardless of one’s role (mentor or protégé).ConclusionIt can be concluded that the expectations of mentors and protégés differed regarding the content and aim of the interpersonal characteristics of their mentoring relationship. We recommend mentors and protégés to more explicitly exchange their expectations of the informal mentoring relationship, as typically practiced in formal mentoring. Additionally, in our study, seniority and lasting relationships seem crucial for good informal mentoring. It appears beneficial to foster lasting informal mentoring relationships and to give more guidance to younger mentors.

This chapter includes a summary of the current environment of higher education for women, an analysis of formal and informal mentoring opportunities and efficacy for women, and recommendations. Women in higher education continue to contend with significant disparities in representation in leadership, biased social norm expectations related to gender, and burdensome professional and personal invisible labor related to service and caretaking. As women face these ongoing and persistent impediments to career progress and ascension, they have created networks of informal mentoring relationships that provide them with support, resources, and resilience as they contend with the male-normed environment of higher education. Informal mentoring relationships are distinct from formal mentoring relationships, as the focus is on providing support for the whole person and not just professional strategy. Informal mentoring is also more accessible to women as the dearth of women in higher education leadership can create a lack of available same-gender formal mentors who have a lens of shared experience.

Mentorship is an active workplace relationship between a mentor and a mentee, aimed at mutual career advancement, which is vital for both employee growth and organizational success. To improve their mentorship structures and processes, organizations must first assess their current practices. Thus, we developed and conducted a cross-sectional survey to evaluate mentorship among employees at a two-site federally funded health services research center. We surveyed Center investigators and other employees (henceforth "staff"), gathering data on mentors, mentees, mentoring relationships, and satisfaction with the Center's mentoring infrastructure. We used social network analysis to examine both formal and informal mentoring relationships and assessed the association of employee connectedness in these networks with reported satisfaction. There were 120 respondents (62.2% response rate). A greater percentage of investigators, compared to staff, had at least one formal mentor (55.8% vs. 25.0%) and one formal mentee (57.7% vs. 10.3%), and investigators had more informal mentors within the Center than staff (4.94 vs. 3.59, p = 0.0485). Investigators reported higher satisfaction with mentorship compared to staff (6.63 vs. 5.25, p = 0.002) and had more formal mentoring relationships with other investigators than staff had with other staff (0.06 vs. 0.01 degree centrality, p < 0.0001). Combining formal and informal mentorship across both investigators and staff, compared to formal mentorship alone, showed fewer degrees of separation (1.32 vs. 3.41 mean distance, p < 0.0001). For the combined formal and informal mentorship network across both investigators and staff, satisfaction with mentoring was associated with having more connections with network members who were connected with each other (r = 0.998, p < 0.0001). To foster connections among employees, research organizations may create opportunities for open communication and collaborative problem-solving. Our survey and findings are timely given the growing emphasis on mentorship's importance for successful careers, motivated employees, and workplace productivity.

ObjectiveTo assess parents' perceptions of barriers and facilitators to promoting informal mentoring relationships for their children with caring adults in their existing social network.BackgroundSupportive relationships with nonparental adults are critical to positive youth development, social capital, healthy living, and upward mobility, but not all children experience such relationships. Because parents are the primary gatekeepers to children's social networks, we presumed that parents could play a role in shaping children's informal mentoring relationships.MethodWe conducted eight focus groups and used a semistructured interview to ask participants about mentoring and potential barriers or facilitators to connecting children with informal mentors. Participants were 55 parents/caregivers (Mage = 41.43 years; 96.4% female; 77.9% unmarried).ResultsParents were open to the involvement of nonparental adults in children's lives, but they differed in the extent to which their social network offered viable mentor candidates. Other barriers included feeling too proud to ask for help and concerns that informal mentors would be unsafe or inconsistent. Facilitative factors included appreciating the benefits of informal mentoring relationships, feeling connected to one's community, and being able and willing to ask for help in the face of doubt or fear.ConclusionParents were generally positive about children receiving support from informal mentors and acknowledged the potential role they could play in forming those connections; they also recognized potential barriers to making those connections.ImplicationsParents' perception about their “village” suggests the need to develop and evaluate programs that help parents connect children with supportive informal mentors.

Purpose: Mentorship is a valuable mechanism of socializing faculty members to higher education, but understanding of how mentoring relationships develop is limited. The purpose of this study was to seek a more complete understanding of how mentoring relationships develop for junior faculty members, and how these effective mentoring relationships can be fostered. Method: A qualitative, phenomenological design was used to examine junior athletic training faculty members’ experiences with mentoring. Twenty athletic training faculty members: 14 women, 6 men, 32±3 years of age and averaged 2.4±2.1 years as a full-time faculty member in an accredited athletic training program participated in this study. Participants completed one telephone interview, which was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analyzed with an inductive phenomenological approach. Data saturation was obtained Trustworthiness strategies included peer review and the use of multi-analyst triangulation. Results: Junior faculty participated in informal and formal mentoring relationships that evolved over time, which aided their transition from doctoral student to full-time faculty member. Additionally, mentoring relationships were strengthened when participants took initiative, engaged in the relationship, and set clear goals. Mentors who exhibit good communication skills, willingness to participate, and genuine interest in the mentee are particularly valuable. Conclusions: Both formal and informal mentoring experiences appear to be valuable for junior faculty members, particularly informal relationships. If institutional mentoring programs are lacking then junior faculty should seek out additional mentoring opportunities. These findings also confirm existing literature on effective mentoring characteristics.

The article discusses a study in which researchers Belle Rose Ragins and John L. Cotton compared formal and informal mentoring programs. They surveyed proteges across three occupations and examined both the mentoring behaviors performed by their mentors and the outcomes they experienced as a result of having been mentored. They found that informal mentoring relationships were much more beneficial to proteges than formal mentoring programs. They also examined the impact of formal and informal mentoring relationships on promotion and compensation outcomes for the proteges and examined gender-based differences associated with mentoring programs. Ragins and Cotton also identify several other possible reasons for the greater benefits of informal mentoring over formal mentoring.

There is a growing recognition of the need for fundamental changes in the way public organizations are structured and managed (Barzelay, 1992; Johnston, 1993; Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). With the environment becoming more turbulent, organizational boundaries changing or even collapsing, and the number of constituents in the political arena increasing, many public organizations will require implementation of a broad range of proactive changes designed to improve organizational functioning. In particular, it is frequently argued that organizations need to reduce their managerial structure, allow greater discretion and responsibility among their front-line employees, and operate more flexibly and innovatively if they are to perform sufficiently well to ensure their survival (Cleveland, 1985; Drucker, 1988; Peters, 1988). The field of planned organizational change, based largely on the knowledge and techniques derived from the organizational development (OD) movement, provides a potentially useful set of approaches for implementing requisite changes along these lines. Although the potential benefits of planned organizational change for public organizations seem apparent, previous literature pertinent to this issue is more equivocal. On the one hand, literature discussing differences between public and private organizations suggests that organizational development may not be as viable in the public sector. In contrast, prior empirical investigations of OD outcomes in the two sectors provide some evidence that OD can be as effective in public organizations. Therefore, further assessment of its utility to public organizations would be a timely and useful venture. In this article, we explore this issue through a meta-analysis of prior evaluations of organizational change projects. Specifically, we compare the outcomes of planned change in the public sector to those generated in private sector organizations. Because expectations regarding differences that might be found between the two sectors are not straightforward, we first discuss in greater depth the potential efficacy of OD in public organizations. Then we turn to a more complete description of the focus and methods of our own analysis. The Potential Efficacy of Organizational Development in Public Organizations Ambiguity regarding the efficacy of planned organizational change in public organizations is based in part on the question of whether or not they differ from private organizations in ways that would limit the effectiveness of organizational development efforts. The traditional perspective has been that key differences between the two sectors have important implications for the likelihood of successfully implementing a program of planned change. Features of public organizations noted most often include the absence of market incentives; the existence of multiple, conflicting goals; and a political context with a broader range of constituent groups, higher levels of accountability, and more rules, regulations, and constraints (Meyer, 1982; Perry and Rainey, 1988). These features may cause problems for the implementation of OD that reflect not just an inappropriate application of theory but the possibility that the theory itself does not fit the reality of public administration (Forbes, 1978). Because private sector organizations are driven primarily by market or consumer preferences, organizational effectiveness is more readily measured in terms of efficiency and profitability. As a result, change activity can be implemented and assessed using these narrow criteria as the primary basis for evaluating their success, possibly making it easier for these change efforts to be successful. In contrast, there are different and more varied criteria by which to assess organizational effectiveness in the public sector. Hence, public organizations may find it more difficult to use planned change interventions effectively, because the primary goal of these efforts will not be as straightforward or as consensually supported. …

Informal mentoring relationships that develop out of frequent and meaningful interaction with faculty and staff are powerful tools that can help community college students persist and succeed in achieving not only their educational goals but their future economic mobility as well (Komosa-Hawkins, 2012; Phillippo, 2010; Zimmerman et al., 2002). Students are more likely to be successful when they can identify and interact with someone on campus who they relate to, can count on for support, and who affirms their sense of belonging (Rendón, 1994). The purpose of this grounded theory study was to identify conditions conducive to the development of informal mentoring relationships between students and faculty and staff at community colleges. Interviews were conducted with 46 faculty, staff, and students at one large Hispanic-serving community college. While the researcher did identify conditions that help and hinder relationship building, the biggest takeaway from the study was a theory involving the role of informal mentoring relationships in students’ structural resiliency. Structural Resiliency Theory asserts that the ability to overcome negative interpersonal interactions is reliant on three interdependent factors: (a) The breadth and depth of one’s personal support system; (b) the collective level of positivity in one’s previous interpersonal interactions; and (c) the combination of one’s motivation, self-confidence, and perseverance. Informal mentors help community college students thrive in the face of adversity by strengthening their structural resiliency. An informal mentor can be a transformative presence in the life of a community college student.

Research into workplace mentoring is primarily focused on the experiences and perceptions of individuals involved in the relationship, while there is scarcely any research focusing on the impact of mentoring relationships on their social environment. This exploratory research aims to give insight into how coworkers’ perceptions and experiences of informal mentoring relationships in their workgroup are related to their perceptions of workgroup functioning. The results of 21 semistructured interviews show that coworkers believe that mentoring relationships affect their workgroup’s functioning by influencing both their workgroup’s performance and climate. Coworkers applied an instrumental perspective and described how they think that mentoring relationships both improve and hinder their workgroup’s performance as they influence the individual functioning of mentor and protégé, the workgroup’s efficiency, and organizational outcomes. Furthermore, coworkers applied a relational perspective and described how mentoring relationships may influence their workgroup’s climate in primarily negative ways as they may be perceived as a subgroup, cause feelings of distrust and envy, and are associated with power issues. The results of this study emphasize the importance of studying mentoring relationships in their broader organizational context and set the groundwork for future research on mentoring relationships in workgroups.

From the perspective of new nurses: What do effective mentors look like in practice?

When we think of continuing professional education (CPE) programs we have attended during our careers, we may remember sitting for what seemed like boundless hours in workshops as experts in our field endlessly droned on about how to better perform our job tasks. During these workshops, we may have looked at charts and overhead displays, taken copious notes and received printed workshop materials that we intended to put into use back on the job. By the end of the program, we may have learned something, which we may or may not have put into practice once we returned to our everyday work. More likely, however, our notes and printed materials were set aside as the realities of everyday life intruded on our newly acquired information. Of course, CPE programs are not always boring, but they may have limited effectiveness for the complicated, everyday messiness of our work when compared to programs that provide real world learning. As Cervero (1992) contends, the popular wisdom among practicing professionals is that the knowledge they acquire from practice is far more useful than what they acquire from more formal forms of education. (p. 91). Cervero (1988, 1992) further proposes that the most useful CPE models require that learners learn from and in their everyday work practice. Their knowledge is situated in the practice environment made even more meaningful by the workplace or everyday context. Mentoring Relationships As Context-Rich Learning One way to promote context-rich learning is through integrating mentoring relationships into continuing professional education programs. Mentoring relationships promote learning in and from the work place, assist learners in receiving career help and help learners realize developmental and psychosocial support. Typical functions associated with mentors include coaching proteges in career-related behaviors, sponsoring and helping provide visibility to proteges within th organization and assigning challenging, work-related assignments. Psychosocial support and actions that mentors might perform include role modeling, confirmation, counseling and friendship. Mentoring relationships occur in either informal relationships or workplace sponsored, formal mentoring programs; how these relationships are formed usually determines the nature of the relationship. Informal mentoring relationships usually occur spontaneously through mutual attraction between mentor and protege and provide psychosocial as well as career help. Formal mentoring programs are those sponsored, sanctioned and planned by organizations or programs. Mentors may be persons with more experience within the organization, or may be peers of the protege--the important defining quality of the mentors is their ability to aid in both psychosocial and career support (Hansman, 1998, 2000). Mentoring relationships may be either internal or external to the proteges workplace. Internal mentors, since they are physically in the same space as the protege, may be able to better shield and protect their proteges from excessive workplace demands. However, external mentors can also provide essential help to proteges. Mentors who work outside of the proteges workplace may be better poised to provide long-range career assistance and help with lateral career transitions (Hansman, 1998, 2000). What Role Can CPE Play in Mentoring? As Cervero (1988, 1992) maintains, the most valuable models of CPE include opportunities for participants to learn from and in their everyday work practice, situating their knowledge out of the tools, contexts, experiences and feedback in the everyday workplace environment. CPE professionals can plan and sponsor mentoring programs that include opportunities for participants to learn from and in a meaningful practice environment, richly situated with tools, relationships and experiences that help them understand and reflect upon their workplace knowledge. …