Mentorship behaviors and mentorship quality associated with formal mentoring programs: Closing the gap between research and practice.

Formal mentoring programs continue to gain popularity within organizations despite limited empiricalresearch regarding how these programs should be designed to achieve maximum effectiveness. Thepresent study examined perceived design features of formal mentoring programs and outcomes from bothmentor and prote ´ge´ perspectives. The outcomes examined were career and psychosocial mentoring, rolemodeling,andmentorshipquality.Ingeneral,theresultsindicatedthatperceivedinputintothementoringprocess and training perceived as high in quality were consistently related to the outcome variables.Implications for the design of formal mentoring programs and future theory development are discussed.Keywords: formal mentoring, mentoring relationships, mentors, prote ´ge´s