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The aims of this critical review are to identify the mentor characteristics that lead to superior mentoring outcomes and to provide human resources development (HRD) professionals with evidence-based suggestions for recruiting, selecting and training mentors to improve mentorship programme effectiveness.

The authors conducted a critical review of existing quantitative research on mentor characteristics that have an impact on effective mentoring.

The authors identified five key categories of mentor characteristics linked to successful mentoring outcomes: competency in context-relevant knowledge, skills and abilities; commitment and initiative; interpersonal skills; pro-social orientation and an orientation toward development, exploration and expansion.

There is limited research on the characteristics of ineffective mentor characteristics, exclusion of articles that used qualitative research methods exclusively and how technology-based communication in mentoring may require different characteristics. Most of the included studies collected data in the United States of America, which may exclude other important mentor characteristics from other non-Western perspectives.

To ensure that there is both a sufficient pool of qualified mentors and mentors who meet the desired criteria, focus on both recruitment and training mentors is important. Incorporating the desired mentor characteristics into both of these processes, rather than just selection, will help with self-selection and development of these characteristics.

Despite the ongoing interest in identifying effective mentor characteristics, the existing literature is fragmented, making this challenging for HRD professionals to determine which characteristics are crucial for mentoring relationships and programme success. Addressing this practical need, this critical review synthesises the research literature and identifies patterns and inconsistencies. Based on the review, the authors provide evidence-based recommendations to enhance the recruitment, selection and training of mentors.

The dual purpose of this paper is (1) to describe and contextualize encounters between mentors' and mentees' differing needs in a leadership development programme and (2) to posit that practice negotiating frictional encounters constructs “good fit” between mentors and mentees and is a potentially important skill for leadership development.

The authors gathered data through qualitative, semi-structured interviews of mentors, mentees and mentoring programme staff participating in a mentoring programme for leadership development offered at a mid-sized Canadian business school. Using a grounded theory, interpretive analytical approach, the authors examine the notion of “good fit” and how it emerged in encounters between participants' diverse needs.

The authors identified participants' mentoring needs by eliciting their experiences of “good fit” in the focal leadership development programme. The findings revealed that encounters between contrasting needs fell into two categories: (1) the need for career advising versus leadership development and (2) the need for structured versus free-flowing conversation. Those encounters, in turn, generated opportunities for leadership development.

The findings have valuable implications for designing mentoring for leadership programmes. Namely, the authors propose pairing individuals with similar deeper-level qualities but diverse educational backgrounds and experiences to allow for practice in negotiating encounters with friction and contrast.

As an empirical study of mentoring for leadership development in practice, this study applies a dialectical approach to encounters across contrasting mentoring needs. In doing so, it locates leadership development potential in those frictional encounters.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and contextualize the processes of leadership development through mentoring in a Leadership Learning Lab (“the Lab”) and to explore the implications and applications of the Lab's approach as a social learning space.

The authors used a constructivist grounded theoretical approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with participants in the Lab, which operated out of a leadership center in a mid-sized Canadian business school.

The findings show that participants used their individual life experiences to practice leadership development through mentoring in a social learning space of prescribed uncertainty. The participants identified with becoming flexible, self-actualized leaders by learning to view their own experiences and those of their Lab partners through a leadership lens.

This study contributes to an understanding of the “doing” of leadership development in a social learning space and highlights three relational processes through which leadership development emerged through mentoring: rapport-building, democratization and reflection.

The purpose of this qualitative review paper is to identify for practitioners ways of matching mentors and protégés to enhance the effectiveness of formal mentoring programs.

The paper qualitatively reviews the best available evidence of ways to match mentors and protégés to maximize mentorship outcomes.

Two factors to consider when making mentor–protégé matches emerged from the research literature (1) the matching process (i.e., how matches are made and facilitated by practitioners such as incorporating participant input on matches): and (2) individual characteristics (i.e., individual differences that may serve as matching criteria such as experiential, surface-level, and deep-level characteristics). This qualitative review resulted in three practical recommendations to practitioners interested in matching mentors and protégés using evidence-based methods: (1) match based on deep-level similarities, (2) consider developmental-needs of protégés during matching, and (3) seek mentors' and protégés’ input before finalizing matches.

Limitations of the research reviewed are highlighted: measures of perceived similarity, relative effectiveness of matching-related factors, limited research investigating the role of dissimilarity on mentoring outcomes, and linear relationship assumptions between matching-related factors and mentoring outcomes.

The authors’ recommendations suggested greater use of valid psychometric assessments to facilitate matching based on actual assessed data rather than program administrators' personal knowledge of mentors and protégés.

The literature on mentor–protégé matching is missing practical guidance on how to apply the research. This highlights a need for a qualitative review of the literature to identify what matching processes and criteria are most effective, providing a “one-stop-shop” for practitioners seeking advice on how to construct effective mentor–protégé matches in formal mentorship programs.

Why some people are motivated to become leaders is important both conceptually and practically. Motivation to lead compels people to seek out leadership roles and is a distinct predictor of leader role occupancy. The goal of our research is to determine contextual (socioeconomic status and parenting quality), interpersonal (sociometric status), and personal (self-esteem and gender) antecedents of the motivation to lead among young adults.

The authors tested the model using two samples of Canadian undergraduate students (Sample 1: N = 174, M age = 20.02 years, 83% female; Sample 2: N = 217, M age = 18.8 years, 54% female). The authors tested the proposed measurement model using the first sample, and tested the hypothesized structural model using the second sample.

The proposed 5-factor measurement model provided an excellent fit to the data. The hypothesized model also provided a good fit to the data after controlling for potential threats from endogeneity. In addition, gender moderated the relationship between sociometric status and affective-identity motivation to lead, such that this interaction was significant for females but not males.

The findings make a practical contribution in understanding how parents, teachers, and organizations can encourage greater motivation to lead, especially among young adults who have faced poverty and marginalization and tend to be excluded from leadership positions in organizations.

The authors conceptualize and test the contextual, interpersonal, and personal predictors of affective-identity motivation to lead among young adults.

This paper investigates the extent to which disability type contributes to differential evaluation of employees by managers. In particular, the authors examined managerial prejudice against 3 disability diagnoses (i.e. psychiatric, physical disability and pending diagnosis) compared to a control group in a return-to-work scenario.

Working managers (N = 238) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 scenarios containing medical documentation for a fictional employee that disclosed either the employee's psychiatric disability, physical disability, or a pending diagnosis. The authors also collected a separate sample (N = 42) as a control group that received a version of the medical documentation but contained no information about the disability diagnosis.

Compared with employees without stated disabilities, employees with a psychiatric disability were evaluated as more aggressive toward other employees, less trustworthy and less committed to the organization. Compared to employees with either physical disabilities or pending diagnoses, employees with psychiatric disabilities were rated as less committed to the organization. The authors discuss implications for future research and the trade-offs inherent in disability labeling and disclosure.

The current study extends prior research by examining a broader range of outcomes (i.e. perceived aggressiveness, trustworthiness and commitment) and moving beyond performance evaluations of employees with disabilities. The authors also assess the relative status of a “pending diagnosis” category—a type of disclosure often encountered by managers in many jurisdictions as part of accommodating employees returning to work from medical-related absence.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate leaders’ use of humor as an expression of how they value themselves relative to others. The paper suggests that humor can minimize or exacerbate the status differences between leaders and followers. The paper hypothesizes that leaders’ use of self‐ or in‐group‐deprecating humor would be positively associated with ratings of transformational leadership as they minimize those distinctions, whereas leaders’ use of aggressive humor would be negatively associated with ratings of transformational leadership because it exacerbates status distinctions.

A total of 155 undergraduates (58 males, 97 females; M age=20 years, SD=1.31) were assigned randomly to one of four conditions, each depicting a different type of humor in a leader's speech.

Leaders using self‐deprecating humor were rated higher on individualized consideration (a factor of transformational leadership) than those that used aggressive humor.

The authors encourage future field research on the role of humor as an expression of leaders’ self‐ versus other‐orientation.

Humor and work might seem inconsistent, but this study demonstrates how leadership can use humor to improve leader‐follower relationships. Furthermore, it contributes to our understanding of self‐deprecating humor which has received scant attention relative to other forms of humor.

This article aims to provide a quantitative review of the range and effects of human resource management (HRM) practices in the North American automotive industry.

A total of 14 studies provided data for an employee‐level meta‐analysis of the relationships comprising high performance work systems in the automotive manufacturing sector. As an extension of research in this context, we hypothesized that three clusters of organizational practices (work systems, HR policies, and leadership) would be associated with two clusters of employee‐level psychosocial outcomes (person‐focused, organizational‐focused) which, in turn, would be related to employee performance.

It was found that work systems and HR policies related to both person‐focused (comprising individual job satisfaction, health, self‐esteem, and social support) and organization‐focused (comprising organizational commitment and perceptions of organizational justice) outcomes. The leadership cluster had a strong association with the person‐focused outcomes. Organizational – but not personal‐focused outcomes were associated with employee performance comprising employee effectiveness, self‐ratings of performance, turnover, and absenteeism.

The results from this study provide support for the role of employee‐level psychosocial outcomes as mechanisms between HRM practices and employee performance, supporting an idea that is often discussed but rarely tested in the literature. These results need to tempered by the fact that this meta‐analysis was based on a relatively small number of studies in one industrial sector, thereby limiting the generalizability of the model.

These data suggest that managing with a high‐involvement orientation is associated with positive consequences for individuals and organizations within the automotive industry. The paper is not espousing the view that technologically‐focused systems are of little value in manufacturing industries, but rather that taking a more humanistic approach to how they are implemented may benefit all parties involved.

This paper provides an empirical review of HRM practices and outcomes in the automotive manufacturing context. The role of leadership in these systems is highlighted. The results offer guidance to researchers and practitioners interested in researching and managing the human side of automobile manufacturing.

We introduce the construct of loving one's job as an overlooked, but potentially informative, construct for organizational research. Following both empirical findings and theoretical developments in other domains we suggest that love of the job comprises a passion for the work itself, commitment to the employing organization, and high-quality intimate relationships with coworkers. We also suggest that love of the job is a taxonic rather than a dimensional construct – one either loves their job or does not. In addition, we propose that loving your job is on the whole beneficial to individual well-being. Within this broad context, however, we suggest that loving one's job may buffer the effect of some stressors while at the same time increase vulnerability to others. These suggestions provide some initial direction for research focused on the love of one's job.

Prior research has demonstrated the positive effects of high involvement work systems on various outcomes but none to date has conducted a comparative test of alternative, plausible models of these systems. This paper aims to address this issue.

A test of five high involvement work system models was conducted. The models were tested using employee perceptions of the presence and effectiveness of the organizational practices included in these systems, whereas a majority of prior studies have measured high involvement work practices based on managers' perceptions only. Measures of eight high involvement work practices (i.e. employment security, selective hiring, extensive training, contingent compensation, teams and decentralized decision making, information sharing, reduced status distinctions, transformational leadership) were used to compare the fit of these five models using confirmatory factor analysis. 317 non‐management employees from five Canadian organizations participated. Participants rated both the extent to which they perceived their organizations to have implemented each of the practices and the perceived effectiveness of these practices. Participants' work attitudes (i.e. affective commitment, continuance commitment, job satisfaction) were used to assess the concurrent validity of the tested models.

For both the perceived presence and effectiveness models, confirmatory factor analyses suggested the superiority of a second‐order model, demonstrating concurrent validity with participants' positive (i.e. affective commitment, job satisfaction) and negative (i.e. continuance commitment) attitudes.

This is the first study to conduct a comparative test of five alternative models of high involvement work systems and one of the few studies to address employee perception of these practices.