THE CHANGING NATURE OF MENTORING IN ORGANIZATIONS - AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON MENTORING IN ORGANIZATIONS

Although the term ''mentor'' originated in Greek mythology, it has bee n only a decade since Kram's (1985) seminal book stimulated significan t research on mentoring in organizations. This special issue brings to gether current empirical research and theory from diverse scholars who have been instrumental in advancing the field of mentoring. We first provide some background on the topic of mentoring and include a brief discussion of the changing nature of mentoring in organizations. Follo wing this, we review the content of the special issue, starting with f ive research articles and concluding with four papers which describe n ew directions for theory building. We conclude with a discussion of ne eded research on mentoring in organizations. (C) 1997 Academic Press.