Must The Mentee Share The Same Qualities As The Mentor?

There is a common assertion that in order for a mentoring relationship to succeed, the mentee must have a similar personality to the mentor's. Elizabeth Alleman and her colleague Isadore Newman (Alleman et al, 1984) attempted to establish whether a similarity of personality or background was indeed the basis of rewarding mentor relationships. Alleman and Newman studied 100 managers, 29 pairs reporting a mentoring relationship and 21 pairs reporting a typical business relationship. The two compared the relationship between the mentor and the mentee to the relationship between a manager and his or her superior. Through personality tests and questionnaires they discovered:

• Mentoring pairs have no more similarities in personality or background than non-mentored pairs. When participants described themselves and their partners, their profiles contained few shared traits.

• Mentoring relationships are not based on complementary personality traits. Newman and Alleman did not find evidence to support the suggestion that mentors choose mentees whose strengths and skills offset the mentor's weaknesses.

• Mentors do not believe there are any special similarities between themselves and their mentees.

• Mentees view their mentors as similar to ideal workers and identify with them to a greater extent than managers who have a non-mentoring relationship with their supervisor.

In short, Alleman and Newman demonstrate that it is not essential for the mentor and mentee to have similar personalities or backgrounds. Indeed, as we have seen, if a cultural readjustment is needed in the organisation, then it may pay to avoid deliberately too close a match.

In another more recent study of personality and mentoring, Engström (1997/1998) examined 30 pairs of mentors and mentees within a Swedish multinational company. The pairs included all gender options except female to female. He based his analysis of personality on five factors, which he describes as ‘generally accepted in the field of personality and [which] include most other personality factors presented in the field'. These are: extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience.

Among Engström's conclusions are that mentoring relationships are seen as most successful when:

• both mentor and mentee demonstrate high extroversion

• both demonstrate a high level of agreeableness (defined as encompassing likeability, friendliness, social adaptability, altruism, affection, compliance)

• the mentee demonstrates much greater conscientiousness than the mentor (ie the mentee assumes ownership of the process)

• in the mentee's perception, the mentee demonstrates high openness to experience and the mentor high emotional stability.

An unexpected conclusion from his research was that men-only mentoring pairs were always perceived by both parties as more successful than mixed gender pairs, whether the woman was mentor or mentee. (Without a female to female comparison, this conclusion should be treated with some caution, insofar as drawing any implications is concerned. )