Publisher's Synopsis
Macro and micro trends suggest expert employees are increasingly important to contemporary businesses, especially firms like Motorola, Inc..Motorola, to increase its competitiveness, encourages its experts to work in cross-functional teams. In the 1960's and 1970's, Motorola lost competitive advantage to the Japanese. In the early 1980's to regain competitiveness, its leadership implemented a cultural change to lessen organizational bureaucracy; encourage learning, expert individual career development and teamwork. This included a formal mentoring programme, modelled upon best practice, using a traditional one-to-one, mentor to protege closed system theory of mentoring.;This is an interdisciplinary study examining a broad band of mentoring literature, and suggests that a void exists and that mentoring might not only occur as prescribed by the traditional model. This book develops an alternative open system theory, which presents mentoring as a protege driven dispersed social activity. This model is tested empirically at Motorola, within the framework of its formal mentoring programme.;A methodology and questionnaire format were designed that depart from prior mentoring research. The required proteges to identify their mentor before answering a series of questions about their mentoring relationship. Instead, this study requires respondents to identify the source from which proteges receive mentoring help. From this, proteges' mentoring a Motorola is a pretefe driven open system - a dispersed social activity, where proteges obtain a large proportion of the mentoring help they receive from a variety of sources Motorola readily makes available. Finding a protege driven open system of mentoring at Motorola suggests that other organizational concepts, including culture, leadership, structures and systems potentially play important roles in organizational mentoring relationships and expert employee career development.
