The Roles of Protégé Race, Gender, and Proactive Socialization Attempts on Peer Mentoring

Abstract

The problem and the solution. A within-subjects design was used to examine the roles of newcomer race, gender, and proactive socialization attempts on potential mentors' willingness to engage in peer mentoring. In this laboratory study, 110 White college students participated. Participants were encouraged to participate as mentors in a new peer mentoring program and were provided with the profiles of 12 potential protégés and asked to evaluate each. Results of repeated-measure ANOVA suggested that female participants were more likely to provide mentoring than were male participants and that mentors were more agreeable to mentoring those who were high in proactive socialization attempts regardless of protégés' race or gender. However, protégé demographic characteristics did influence access to peer mentoring for protégés depicted as low or moderate in proactivity. A discussion of these findings and their implications for human resource development research and practice are offered.

Linking Mentoring and Social Capital: Implications for Career and Organization Development

“…A broader range of structural characteristics have been investigated within the social capital literature, which is not surprising given the definitional constraints of the social ties within the mentoring literature. Studies of peer mentoring (Ensher, Thomas, & Murphy, 2001;Kram & Isabella, 1985;Thomas, Hu, Gewin, Bingham, & Yanchus, 2005) and comparisons of supervisory versus nonsupervisory mentoring (Payne & Huffman, 2005;Scandura & Williams, 2004) are examples of how structural characteristics have been explored in the mentoring literature. Further insights into mentoring may be gained by incorporating additional structural concepts into future research, such as the concept of network diversity included in Higgins and Kram's (2001) typology of developmental networks.…”

Mentoring and Human Resource Development: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go

“…The remaining three articles address the individual and contextual factors of protégé gender and race, virtual mentoring, and the ethics of mentoring that affect the field of HRD broadly in terms of application. Thomas, Hu, Gewin, Bingham, and Yanchus (2005) help close the gap in the research on access to mentoring through examining the roles of protégé race and gender in mentors' willingness to serve as a peer mentor. Bierema and Hill (2005) and McDonald and Hite (2005) provide much-needed insight into the contextual issues associated with virtual mentoring and ethics, which are important to our understanding of mentoring practices in HRD.…”

Mentorship in Family Therapy Training Programs: Students’ and New Graduates’ Perspectives

“…One could accept the predominance of ethnic and sexual orientation matching and conclude that students are choosing programs with faculty similar to themselves. Although ethnic and sexual orientation matching could be seen as providing mentees with understanding and support, it may also serve to promote complacency if it means that faculty are preferring mentees because they remind them of themselves (Thomas, Hu, Gewin, Bingham, & Yanchus, 2005). Since prior researchers have found that graduate students felt that the quality of the mentorship provided from people similar to themselves was better, perhaps a both-and track is best.…”