Virtual relationships and real benefits: using e‐mentoring to connect business students with practicing managers

Abstract

This article reports the results of our study of electronic mentoring (e‐mentoring) in a population of business students. As career paths have become more fluid and less predictable, a growing number of educational and business organizations have implemented traditional and, more recently, e‐mentoring programs. But practice is ahead of evaluation when it comes to e‐mentoring. We attempted to fill this gap by looking more closely at strengths and weaknesses associated with this type of mentoring. Building on research in traditional mentoring and integrating literature in computer‐mediated communication, education and management, we developed a model of e‐mentoring’s antecedents and outcomes. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of business students (protégés) who were mentored by practicing managers. It was found that perceived similarity in terms of attitudes and values is positively related to effective e‐mentoring, while demographic similarity (gender, race) is not. Moreover, effective e‐mentoring may lead to protégés’ enhanced academic performance, professional network and job opportunities. We conclude with implications of our findings and a discussion of opportunities for future research.

Keywords:

• e‐mentoring
• mentor
• protégé

Notes

1. MentorNet pairs undergraduate and graduate female students with professionals in science, technology, engineering, and math (see MentorNet, 2003 and Single & Muller, 2001, for more information).

2. Of the total, all of the undergraduate students (n = 162) were full‐time students, while 17 of the 21 graduate students were full‐time employees/part‐time students.

3. Of these 123 same‐ethnicity pairs, only seven represented minority‐minority (i.e. nonwhite) pairs. A recent trend in community and education mentoring takes a closer look at the breakdown of same‐ethnicity pairings as it relates to overall effectiveness of the mentoring relationship. Our small number of minority‐minority mentor/protégé pairs renders this type of analysis impossible.

4. Given the non‐normal distribution of this variable, we felt that utilizing frequency as a continuous variable would be less accurate than creating a dichotomous measure.

5. Recall that one third of our mentor/protégé pairs were cross‐ethnic pairs and 42% were cross‐gender pairs.