2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

especially formal programs. She suggests that
mentoring relationships may become dysfunctional
when the relationship is not working for one or both
of the participants and the needs of the parties are
not being met. This dysfunction is more likely to
occur in formal programs where not enough thought
was given to matching the mentor with the mentee.
One interesting issue is, does mentoring “cause”
success or do mentors look for people who they
view to have high potential and then develop the
mentoring relationship (Jacobi, 1991; Scandura,
1998)?
Mentoring in Colleges of Business
Schlee (2000) found that nearly half of surveyed
business schools offered some type of mentoring
experience. Alumni were the mentors about 75
percent of the time, most programs focused on
career development and most colleges relied on the
mentees selecting their mentors. In follow-up
interviews with mentoring program administrators,
she found one of the biggest challenges was
undergraduate student motivation. Most students did
not have clear goals or expectations for the
mentoring experience. As a result, mentors found
that students were not prepared with questions,
lacked enthusiasm for learning and were
uncommunicative. This led to the administrators
suggesting that the programs help students set
goals and require students to put them in writing.
Interestingly, only a third of the schools measured
student satisfaction. An example of a mentoring
program from that era was a report by Barker and
Pits (1997) on the use of MBA students as mentors
for undergraduate student business policy teams
which were developing strategic plans for an
assigned company.
Recently, Whiting and de Janasz (2004) reported on
a mentoring class assignment required at their
university. It had elements of both informal and
formal mentoring programs. The informal aspect was
students finding their own mentors but the formal
portions were the requirements the students needed
to meet and the grading of the mentor exercise.
Students had to find mentors with at least ten years
of experience, who had managed a budget of at
least one million dollars and had ten direct reports
sometime in their career. The students were
required to e-mail three questions to their mentors,
write a commentary on the mentors’ responses and
be prepared to orally discuss the responses in class.
The students’ questions were related to topics in
management and international management classes
and less directly related to career development.
While the authors did provide some student quotes
90
on the value of the mentoring assignment, the
professors did not present any quantitative
measures of satisfaction, nor do a pre-post analysis
of the students’ perceptions of mentoring.
MENTORING COURSE PROJECT
Having taught undergraduate marketing majors for a
number of years, we found that students benefited
from more contacts with marketing practitioners.
Students needed to learn more about how marketing
concepts were being applied by marketing
professionals. The students also needed help with
career planning and identification of specific job
search tactics. Thus, we thought current students
needed to learn firsthand about mentoring.
In the terminology of the mentoring literature we
conceived the project as being structured and formal
with emphasis on career management. This meant
the students would be assigned to mentors, the
students would have requirements for their
interactions with the mentors, and there were
specific things required of the students to complete
the mentoring course project.
Alumni Mentors
The university alumni association provided a list of
alumni and we chose those marketing majors who
had at least five years of experience. Approximately
80 alumni were contacted via e-mail that explained
the nature and time expectations of the assignment.
Forty-five responded expressing interest in
participating. Of these, 23 were assigned to students
for the project.
Student Mentees
All students taking a senior strategic marketing
management capstone course taught by one of the
coauthors participated in the study.
Mentoring Assignment Objectives
The first objective was for students to learn about
mentors and how mentors could/would help them
with their careers. The second goal was for students
to gain perspectives on marketing course content
from practitioners. The third objective was for
students to gain insights on marketing positions and
activities. Finally, we wanted students to treat emails
as professional correspondence. This meant
they needed to use proper grammar, punctuation,
spelling and message structure.