The study of mentoring spans a wide range of disciplines including psychology, organizational behavior, education, and social work, among others. However, until recently there has been little interdisciplinary dialogue among mentoring scholars. In this Special Issue we attempt to lay the groundwork for interdisciplinary research on mentoring by examining this phenomenon through the lens of youth mentoring, academic mentoring, and workplace mentoring. In this introduction we outline the aims of this Special Issue, provide a common definition of mentoring to guide the reader through the articles that follow, summarize the knowledge gained from the included articles, and offer insight into what we believe are important next steps for developing a multidisciplinary perspective on mentoring.
Mentoring relationships are ubiquitous; they exist between youth and unrelated adults, peers, students and faculty, and organizational members. These relationships take many forms. Some mentoring relationships develop spontaneously between two individuals whereas others originate in formal mentoring programs in community settings, on college campuses, or within organizations (Allen & Eby, 2007b). Mentoring research and practice has developed through the work of a multidisciplinary community of scholars, each focusing on a specific population or mentoring target. Researchers with disciplinary backgrounds in community and/or developmental psychology, sociology, and social work tend to study youth mentoring relationships. Researchers with disciplinary roots in education and counseling psychology investigate mentoring relationships within academic settings. Organizational psychologists and management researchers tend to focus on workplace mentoring. Thus, within the mentoring literature, the population of focus (e.g., youth, college student, employee) is intertwined with disciplinary perspective. This is shown in Table 1, which also illustrates that there is little disciplinary overlap in the study of different target populations. Mentoring research has developed firm foundations within disciplines and target populations. The aim of the Special Issue is to facilitate a shift from a multidisciplinary approach, where two or more disciplines examine the same problem but with limited integration, to an interdisciplinary perspective characterized by assimilation and borrowing of ideas, concepts, and methods across disciplines.
The aim of this Special Issue is to introduce readers to original empirical research on various mentoring targets, including mentoring that occurs in community settings, academic settings, and organizational settings. The articles contained in this issue focus on mentoring across the lifespan—ranging from youth mentoring (Rhodes, Lowe, Litchfield, & Walsh-Samp), to the mentoring of young adults in college settings (Smith-Jentsch, Scielzo, Singelton, & Rosopa), to mentoring relationships between individuals after they enter the workforce (Gentry, Weber, & Sadri; Parise & Forret). In addition, three articles in the Special Issue examine mentoring in multiple contexts and/or during more than one developmental period (Eby, Allen, Evans, Ng, & DuBois; Higgins, Dobrow, & Chandler; Liang, Spencer, Brogan, & Corral). Taken as a whole these articles offer new ideas regarding theories and methods that can be applied to the study of mentoring relationships across disciplinary boundaries.
