The missing voices of learning and development professionals: Factors influencing formal and informal practices of reverse mentoring

Abstract

There is dearth of studies exploring the likelihood of reverse mentoring practices being accepted or resisted in diverse organizational contexts. Moreover, prior studies on reverse mentoring have focused on the formal programmatic implementations instead of exploring the informal instances where senior employees learn from their junior colleagues in organizations. To address these gaps, we pose the question: What are the factors necessary for formal and informal reverse mentoring to succeed? We utilized a qualitative methodology based on in–depth semi–structured interviews with 10 globally located learning and development professionals from Asia, Europe, and the Americas who are often tasked with executing mentoring initiatives in their respective organizations. Our findings indicate that reverse mentoring can be successfully practiced both formally and informally if such practices are aligned with the cultural preferences of the context.

Ready to learn from your students? Chinese undergraduate students' experiences of informal reverse mentoring

“…Informal reverse mentoring offered an array of benefits in the Chinese higher education context, including increased self‐confidence, a sense of accomplishment, and research engagement among students as well as enhanced professional competence among supervisors. This is similar to previous findings in the workplace where less experienced mentors receive increased job satisfaction and increased engagement, while more experienced mentees gain content knowledge and technical skills (e.g., Chaudhuri, Ghosh, & Park, 2022; Garg et al., 2021; Murphy, 2012). Our data also showed that increased self‐confidence and sense of accomplishment further increased students' willingness to express their own opinions, creating conditions for the next round of reverse mentoring.…”

“…Effective reverse mentoring was indeed found in our cases where the supervisor–student relationship was relatively equal: The supervisor was open minded and eager to learn from the students, while the student was daring enough to express competing views or point out errors of the supervisor. This is also consistent with Chaudhuri, Ghosh, and Park's (2022) views on successful reverse mentoring: “the senior mentees do not feel embarrassed to learn from their juniors’ expertise and the junior mentors do not feel inhibited to contribute to their seniors' learning” (p. 15). Our study confirms the crucial role of generational equity in the success of informal reverse mentoring, especially when it takes place in a Chinese undergraduate research supervision context.…”

“…We found that when supervisors communicated in a collaborative style and organized meetings for students to share new ideas as an integral part of the meeting, students were more likely to engage in informal reverse mentoring. More studies have focused on formal reverse mentoring programs (e.g., Chaudhuri, Ghosh, & Park, 2022), in which the students were assigned as mentors for a predetermined learning objective. Therefore, our study is one of the first to reveal the critical role of the supervisor in creating the structural conditions for informal reverse mentoring, such as assigning students the informal mentor role and initiating learning objectives.…”

“…Nevertheless, these previous studies have mainly focused on formal reverse mentoring in Western countries, and informal practices of reverse mentoring are often unnoticed (Chaudhuri, Park, & Johnson, 2022). Informal reverse mentoring is defined as an on‐the‐job spontaneous relational exchange of knowledge, feedback, and ideas where senior employees benefit by gaining a new perspective or skill and junior employees gain self‐esteem and respect by contributing to their senior colleagues' professional development (Chaudhuri, Ghosh, & Park, 2022). It is different from formal reverse mentoring, for which junior employees are assigned as mentors to their senior counterparts for a predetermined learning objective.…”

Future-proofing ecological knowledge management practices in the workplace: Lessons from the pandemic

“…Also, as virtual collaboration platforms have user-friendly interfaces that require minimal technical expertise (Walter-Tscharf, 2022), it was easier for the aged working population to adapt to the technology. With the subscription model, companies do not have to invest in infrastructure, which was not in place or part of the budget during the pandemic [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49].…”