Mentoring - A Multifaceted Developmental Tool in the Employment Life Cycle

Mentoring is being used extensively by various corporate set ups, both public and private for career as well as personal development. Business houses are in constant pursuit to transform and are working towards making employees more productive. Organizations are aggressively utilizing mentoring programs as a developmental tool in this effort to make employees more engaged, highly effective and motivated. Given the escalating war for talent in today's competitive environment, the integration of effective mentoring strategies, processes and programs into the corporate culture of an organization can contribute to its competitive advantages in many ways beyond its recent linkages just to improvement in creation of leadership pools, effective retention and engaged workforce.

The handing over of tacit information, values, culture and specialized skills by using mentoring as a tool of knowledge transfer is being used in many Indian organizations. Organizations have started looking towards formal mentoring programs as a means of knowledge continuity, instituting a culture of nurturing, caring and sharing. Mentoring has become a means to familiarize new joins in the culture of the organization, grooming ethnic minorities or special groups including women, plateau employees and finally integrating high potential employees more rapidly into the main stream. Mentoring offers the flexibility of a tool which can be of immense assistance to employees at different stages of employee life cycle which begins with an employee joining an organization, managing his/her performance through their stay in the organization, their development, and career planning.

Mentoring is not a one size fit all phenomenon, hence the inevitability to align the mentoring process with the strategy and objective of an organization cannot be denied. Though there is a huge body of literature on mentoring, both formal and informal, however there does not appear an attempt to identify specially customized mentoring programs to suit employees belonging to different generation of employees through their life cycle in an organization. Awareness on the kind of developmental assistance mentor can provide to a relatively inexperienced employee across generations, in both public and private sector organizations have been gaining ground. The knowledge shared in the article would assist the human resource function to adapt and rework the mentoring process on need basis. The discovery and journey of mentoring as an important tool in the human resources training and development kit has been briefly shared. Another purpose of this article is to provide mentoring scholars with a review of novel methods used in organizational mentoring research.