AN EVALUATION OF FORMAL MENTORING STUDIES AND A MODEL FOR THEIR IMPROVEMENT

New employees often learn an organization's unwritten rules-the ''rope s'' through one-on-one relationships with workplace colleagues or ment ors. Increasingly, organizations are implementing mentoring programs t o foster supportive work relationships-and evaluators are being called on to assess them. This paper presents a systematic literature review of mentoring-type program evaluations and reveals wide gaps in what p ublished studies report. The complex and long-term nature of mentoring programs presents unique challenges to evaluators. To meet these chal lenges we suggest an evaluation model that attends to local audience n eeds and addresses four evaluation stages: (I) context evaluation, for assessing needs, objectives and organizational support; (2) design ev aluation, to assess mentor and protege characteristics, the process fo r pairing the mentor and protege, the program duration, activities and recognition/rewards for participants; (3) implementation stage evalua tion, to monitor activities, feedback and revisions; and (4) product e valuation, to assess systematically the planned and unplanned outcomes that consist of program reactions, learning, behavior change, and imp act.