Search results

The purpose of this systematic literature review is to catalog, explore and disseminate knowledge developed related to the affordances, constraints and collaborative practices of e-mentoring in order to offer recommendations for mentoring programs.

After identifying studies utilizing inclusion and exclusion criteria and a variety of relevant databases, chosen studies were organized into three categories based on e-mentoring practices.

Results reflect chat-room-based e-mentoring and e-mentoring with a video component both to have various affordances and collaborative features. These forms of e-mentoring can potentially be relevant to new teachers’ needs, may promote community and are disconnected from mentees’ school systems. A third form of e-mentoring, virtual reality e-mentoring, however, has the potential for accessibility issues and lack of relevancy to the mentoring process.

Chat-room-based e-mentoring and e-mentoring with a video component may benefit new teachers who do not have access to in-person mentors. However, these forms of e-mentoring may necessitate a component that ensures mentors and mentees alike remain consistently engaged in the e-mentoring process.

Many of today’s top organizations have implemented formal mentoring programs as a vital strategy to attract, develop, and retain talent. Human resource professionals have long recognized mentoring programs as an effective method to grow their organization’s intellectual capital and remain competitive. Both qualitative and quantitative research found that mentored employees experience job satisfaction, productivity and career advancement, which in turn creates profitability and cost savings for organizations. Historically, formal workplace mentoring programs were for a select number of employees. Due to time and geography constraints, face-to-face meetings between mentor and protégé were difficult to coordinate. While traditional mentoring programs provide benefit, logistics prohibit these relationships from taking full progression, giving rise to a new alternative: E-Mentoring. E-Mentoring lowers hurdles to participation using synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated means. Technological advances and forms of computer-mediated communication such as emails, chat groups, and video conferencing offer the potential for enhancing the E-Mentoring process. These new methods help to transcend functional, sectoral, and hierarchical barriers of formal mentoring relationships. Also, the non-face-to-face nature of the E-Mentoring relationship overcomes traditional barriers of age, race, gender, and status, which might negatively affect a traditional mentoring relationship. This chapter defines and compares traditional mentoring with E-Mentoring. It discusses the benefits and challenges of using technology or computer-mediated communication (CMC) for mentoring purposes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how organizations can implement E-Mentoring as a professional development tool in the age of technology.

The present paper aims at discussing the transformative potential of an e‐mentoring support with regard to mentors' and mentees' learning and behavioral aspects, through an empirical study based on rural women entrepreneurs in Greece.

Mentors' and mentees' perceptions with regard to the benefits they acquired in terms of knowledge, skills and behavioral aspects were assessed through questionnaires that were collected in three time periods – before, right after and six months upon the completion of the intervention.

E‐mentoring can serve as a dynamic, two‐fold relationship that can create a significant learning database benefiting both sides. Mentees' knowledge and skills were positively influenced, while their attitudes facing uncertainty, flexibility and innovation were found to be strongly influenced in the short and long run. Mentors did not seem to acquire extraordinary benefits from e‐mentoring in terms of knowledge and skills, while their attitudes towards flexibility and interest in people demonstrate a marginally negative tendency. Both mentors' and mentees' self‐confidence demonstrated an increased tendency and was influenced throughout the intervention and six months upon its completion.

Besides benefiting the direct e‐mentoring participants and enhancing the development of women entrepreneurship, findings can also significantly benefit management and policy‐makers alike, creating avenues to further advance future efforts and practices in raising tomorrow's women entrepreneurs.

Theoretical and empirical evidence in the field of e‐mentoring as well as on encouraging future women entrepreneurs remains scarce. The present paper constitutes a first step towards suggesting an approach to e‐mentoring practices, raising awareness and faith with regard to the beneficial role that e‐mentoring support can have in the development of women entrepreneurship.

Mentoring is frequently cited as playing an important role in the career development of successful women managers. E‐mentoring is relatively new and under‐researched, particularly outside North America. The present research investigates the advantages of e‐mentoring for women through a pilot programme set up with 28 mentor pairs. E‐mentoring is compared with traditional mentoring, and the potential of e‐mentoring for women's management development is evaluated. Challenges included encouraging participants to use all the resources of an e‐mentoring system and to develop fluency in online communication. The quality of the mentoring relationship remained the most important factor in the success of e‐mentoring. The paper identifies areas for further development in e‐mentoring.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the argument for the transformative potential of e‐mentoring support to women entrepreneurs, presenting an e‐mentoring intervention to rural women entrepreneurs in Greece.

A six stage e‐mentoring process is practiced through a project supporting rural women entrepreneurs, based on mentees' and mentors' reactions. Their expressed degree of satisfaction with regard to the e‐mentoring relationship, achievement of personal goals, as well as their desire to continue the relationship are served as useful indicators. Questionnaires are used during three times (pre and post the e‐mentoring relationship, i.e. before, just after its end and six months later) to obtain information from mentees' and mentors' groups.

The features of the quality of the e‐mentoring relationship such as mentors'/mentees' characteristics, frequency of contacts, and e‐services are judged to be satisfactory by both mentors and mentees. Mentees perceive that they sufficiently achieved their personal goals, emphasizing the successful role modeling that their mentors provide. Mentors gain publicity and the broadening of their connections.

The survey results could offer substantial assistance to decision makers concerning designing and implementing e‐mentoring processes supporting female entrepreneurship.

Despite the explosion of online mentoring opportunities, few academic articles and little empirical evidence have addressed e‐mentoring support to women entrepreneurs. The present paper attempts to add research results and suggests a framework of e‐mentoring process discussing both mentors' and mentees' reactions.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the current conversation on and research into the potential use of technology as a means of transforming mentoring processes and those engaged in them. The authors examine the manner in which technology is being integrated into mentoring endeavors and the advantages and disadvantages of this tool, arguing that the particular attributes of e-mentoring make it an ideal platform for enhancing mentoring processes and outcomes through the use of new mentoring perspectives. They describe a specific mentoring perspective that could be adopted as a means of critically examining some of the opportunities and challenges of using technology as a tool for transformational mentoring, with an emphasis on mentoring in educational environments.

This conceptual paper uses a constructionist perspective to mentoring as a lens to examine how technology influences the mentoring process and investigates the implications of transformational e-mentoring for educational professionals.

The paper contends that e-mentoring may extend mentoring's horizons to include increasingly broad and diverse constellations of mentors for protégés. With proper guidance, the relationships made possible through e-mentoring can fulfill many mentoring functions and transform both mentors and protégés as they learn from one other.

Other than descriptions of mentoring programs that use technological tools, very little research on the outcomes of e-mentoring is available. The paper calls for a greater focus on the outcomes of e-mentoring in future research.

The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of e-mentoring, presents recommendations for using new technologies to enhance mentoring programs in education and argues for the need to reconsider the purposes and structures of such programs.

The paper lays the groundwork for a better understanding of technology's role in mentoring in today's complex, rapidly changing knowledge society.

While information and communications technology provides new opportunities for supporting mentoring, there is a need to explore how effectively these potential benefits are being realised. This paper seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of a program in the small business context as a basis for proposing determinants of e‐mentoring effectiveness.

Using qualitative inquiry, this study aims to establish patterns in the characteristics of effective and ineffective e‐mentoring partnerships using a model derived from information systems success field.

The study establishes a basis for understanding how the potential benefits of structured e‐mentoring are being realised in the small business context.

The study empirically establishes a range of determinants of effective e‐mentoring in the small business context.

The study provides a set of critical success factors and evaluation criteria for use by practitioners who are developing and evaluating the effectiveness of e‐mentoring programs.

Purpose – This paper aims to advance the argument for the transformative potential of e‐mentoring for professional women. Design/methodology/approach – Existing mentoring and e‐mentoring models are evaluated as the context for the development of an innovative e‐mentoring programme for professional women in the UK (Empathy‐Edge). The European Union‐funded programme consisted of 122 participants who were matched by a combination of psychological profiling and analytical processing of these data to produce optimal matches. The e‐mentoring system employed a comprehensive range of resources and communication media which are often not included in similar systems. Findings – Initial evaluation data are presented. The benefits and challenges of e‐mentoring are analysed, together with initial recommendations for implementing effective schemes. Practical implications – The paper argues that e‐mentoring is a valuable tool for the career and management development of both returners and employed women who wish to break through the “glass ceiling”. It also indirectly improves their information and communications technologies (ICT) skills. Additionally, the paper demonstrates the strategic importance of psychological profiling for matching mentoring participants. Originality/value – The field of e‐mentoring is relatively new and is under‐researched, particularly from a European perspective. Combining insights from the fields of mentoring, gender in management, and computer‐mediated communication, Empathy‐Edge offers a new approach to career development for professional women.

This paper draws upon policy‐based research that was conducted for the SBS South East to provide a meta‐review of academic literature that examines the role of e‐mentoring in entrepreneurial education and support. Four education and training relevant themes are explored: What is e‐mentoring in SMEs? How effective is e‐mentoring in SMEs? What examples are there of e‐mentoring in SMEs? What advice is there on introducing e‐mentoring for SMEs? The article concludes that current research falls short of a robust evaluation; nevertheless, by drawing upon a range of associated e‐mentoring research it has been possible to provide some helpful examples of practice and tentative advice on the introduction of such schemes.

This paper seeks to examine the effectiveness of an innovative e‐mentoring programme introduced in an international group of luxury hotels.

The paper employs the survey method, with quantitative and qualitative data analysis. The research model was developed from a literature review.

While mentoring programmes have generally gained increasing popularity in various organisations, in the recent past the success of e‐mentoring has attracted little empirical research. E‐mentoring is a vehicle for providing a guided mentoring relationship over large distances, largely through e‐mail, but also by using technology, including the voice over internet protocol (VOIP). Questionnaires were administered to 193 mentors and mentees engaged in a pilot e‐mentoring programme. A unique model was developed and now needs to be applied to a range of organisations and their e‐mentoring programmes. There are three key elements to the model: first, the introduction of weighted criteria, which allows mentees to select those elements that are most important in the achievement of their personal learning objectives in the mentoring programme. Second, the mentee is encouraged to interview potential mentors before making a final choice. If global mentoring is to be successful, this interview will require web conferencing facilities so that the proposed matched pairs can also observe each another. The third aspect is the evaluation by both mentor and mentee at the end of the relationship in order to close the communications loop and to be able to assess the overall effectiveness of the matching practice and so encourage continuous development and enhancement of the process.

The model should be further tested, applied and refined as necessary across a range of different organisations.

A novel and innovative model was developed from a literature review and tested in a large international group of luxury hotels. It will be of value to managers and HRD researchers.