This research indicates that collaborative idea sessions can be beneficial in work sessions if the brainwriting paradigm is used with an appropriate alternation of group ideation or review sessions with individual idea generation sessions.

In the current study, we sought to further our understanding of the relations between various types of protégé-reported mentoring functions (psychosocial and career support and role modeling [RM]) by conducting a meta-analysis. We examined the relationships among these functions and investigated their relationships with expected mentorship outcomes. There is still a great deal left for us to understand regarding how these functions relate to outcomes and what these relationships mean. We expanded upon previous meta-analyses in the following ways: We included RM functions in addition to psychosocial and career support functions, corrected for unreliability of the function scales in addition to sampling error, and examined the relations of these functions with one another. Results show that all the mentoring functions were related to outcomes, with RM being the strongest predictor. Finally, we identified and conceptually analyzed numerous moderators of these relations.

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Mentoring relationships are frequently used as tools to increase employee productivity. However, little is understood in how to best pair mentors and protégés in formal mentoring programs. This study examined the extent to which individual demographic and dispositional variables interact with various mentor characteristics to predict ratings of the profiles of those mentors. The results of this study are consistent with the notion that gender, race, and similarity of mentors and protégés may be an important consideration when the protégé believes that psychosocial support functions are valuable. This article aims to provide some guidance in regards to overseeing mentoring relationships.

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