Does Mentoring Matter?

Across programs, research, and institutions, a common question when it comes to mentoring is, does it matter? Or, to put it another way, does it work? Historically, the answers to these questions have come within disciplinary silos: youth, academic, and organizational. In this meta-analysis by Lillian Eby et al. (2008), the authors sought to answer the question, “Looking across different areas of mentoring scholarship, does mentoring matter, and if so, how much?”

While the effect sizes are small, they found that 1. mentoring is significantly correlated in a favorable direction with a wide range of protégé outcomes, 2. mentoring appears to be more highly related to some protégé outcomes (e.g., school attitudes) than to others (e.g., psychological stress & strain), 3. there is evidence (albeit mixed) that there may be moderators of some mentoring-outcome relationships, and 4. there is tentative evidence of differences in the extent to which mentoring is associated with some outcomes across youth, academic, and workplace relationships.