Preparing college students to be active contributors to the next generation is an important function of higher education. This assumption about generativity forms a cornerstone in this mixed methods study that examined generativity levels among 273 college students at a 4-year public university. MANCOVA results indicated that college students who mentor demonstrated significantly higher generativity than non-mentoring students. Interviews with 9 mentoring students revealed that, although a “seed of generativity” may have already been planted, their mentoring experience served as a “lab” for learning how to be generative. The integrated findings offer important contributions relative to leadership and social responsibility.

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Mentoring, coaching, and advising are often confused as similar interactions with developmental intent, yet their scope, purpose, and utility in leadership development are distinct. The purpose of this chapter is to provide clarity as to what constitutes mentoring, coaching, and advising for leadership development and to compare and contrast each relationship type.

This grounded theory study explored the impact of community engagement on how youth leaders develop. A paradigm model illustrating this developmental process is presented, which includes the conditions that empowered the youth to engage in their community, the strategies used by the youth and the adults in their work together, the conditions that helped/hindered those strategies, and the resulting outcomes. Results of the analysis indicated that individual connections, common sentiments, and being asked to engage were identified as the most salient causal conditions. The action taken by the youth and adult respondents mobilized those individual connections and common sentiments into social capital, which was then converted into individual and community outcomes.

Mentoring is recognized as one of the most promising practices for both leader and leadership development because of its effectiveness at facilitating development (Day, 2001). Mentoring embeds leadership development within the ongoing experiences of a developing leader-an increasingly desired feature of leadership development interventions (Day & Liu, 2019). Each mentoring opportunity generates unique leadership development experiences and outcomes. An effective mentoring relationship satisfies the need to develop and sustain positive relationships; linking mentoring to positive affective, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes (Allen & Eby, 2010). Mentoring develops intrapersonal and interpersonal competence in the mentee, expanding their understanding of organizations and achieving greater social capital (Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm, & McKee, 2014). Mentorship also positively influences outcomes like leadership self-efficacy, political skills, and socially responsible leadership (Chopin, Danish, Seers, & Hook, 2013; Dugan & Komives, 2010). Mentors themselves also benefit from increased pride and satisfaction, refined leadership competencies, stronger confidence, improved job performance, and higher levels of generativity (Hastings et al., 2015).