Informal mentoring as an organisational resource

Mentoring is a mechanism for supporting junior managers but until now little research on the benefits to the organisation has been reported. This paper reports on a survey of managers in a UK local government authority to ascertain their views of the benefits of informal mentoring to the organisation. Both mentors and proteges perceived mentoring as investment in a future pool, of managers and a tool for the management of change. Mentoring was also seen as assisting in the transfer of knowledge, organisational learning and cross-departmental communication-in other words, as nodes in an information network. Further research is suggested into mentoring as a micro-level knowledge-producing community of practice. As informal mentoring is likely to bring longer-term advantages to the organisation,, the paper also discusses how to capture the benefits of informal mentoring when designing formal schemes. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.