Fostering trust in mentoring relationships: an exploratory study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Mentoring has been identified as a key strategy to career development and has been argued to be indispensable for women to advance to positions of power. For mentoring to succeed, it is imperative that mentors trust their protégés. However, recent research has suggested that male mentors trust their male protégés more so than their female protégés. Since women are frequently mentored by men, it is imperative that they gain the same level of trust as their male peers enjoy. According to an established model of trust, trust is shaped by the mentor's perceptions of protégé ability, benevolence and integrity, as well as perceptions of the risk inherent to mentoring. This exploratory research aims to examine what influences these perceptions to shed light on how protégés can gain the trust of their mentors. Design/methodology/approach Because little research has been conducted in this area, an exploratory qualitative design was chosen. Mayer, Davis and Schoorman's model of organizational trust is used as the theoretical framework. Findings This research sheds light on what predicts how trust is formed, fostered and lost in a mentoring context by examining factors that may influence perceptions of ability, benevolence, integrity and risk. Several protégé behaviors were identified that influenced perceptions of ability. Perceptions of benevolence were described as “feelings”. Perceptions of integrity were influenced by keeping confidences. Finally contextual factors, such as gender, were also identified as influencing the level of trust. Research limitations/implications The sample size was based on only 24 mentors; as a consequence, the findings are exploratory in nature and not generalizable. Practical implications Trust has been identified as a critical component of an effective mentoring relationship. As a consequence, mentoring programs must include activities that assist in establishing and fostering trust between mentor and protégé. Social implications Women are still under‐represented in positions of power. Mentoring has been widely adopted as a mechanism to help women climb the corporate ladder. The lack of female mentors frequently means that female protégés have to be mentored by men. If women are to break the “glass ceiling,” it is imperative that male mentors trust their female protégés to the same extent as their male protégés and provide them with the same career advancing opportunities. Originality/value Very little research has examined the role of trust in mentoring, although trust has been identified as a critical element in other organizational activities, such as leadership, performance appraisal, labor‐management relations, interpersonal cooperation, e‐commerce transactions and self‐managing work teams.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".