Title: Mentoring: the unexamined link in strategic human capital management

Authors: Heather Getha-Taylor, Jeffrey L. Brudney

Addresses: Department of Public Administration, Campbell Public Affairs Institute, Syracuse University, 306E Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA. ' Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2121 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44115, USA

Abstract: Although some of the largest US federal organisations sponsor mentoring programmes, including the Coast Guard, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Health and Human Services, mentoring has received comparatively little attention as an approach to address strategic human capital management goals. Drawing upon mentoring programme documents, government reports, scholarly literature, and interviews with senior executives and mentoring professionals, this article examines mentoring from this larger context. We find that mentoring programmes have traditionally focused on transferring knowledge from senior to junior levels. The continued development of senior executives through mentoring has largely been ignored in public administration research. This article not only considers the potential impact of traditional forms of mentoring on achieving strategic human capital goals, but also presents a |life cycle| or continuum of mentoring and elaborates its implications for senior level executives in the federal service.

Keywords: employment life cycle; senior executive mentoring; strategic management; human capital; knowledge transfer; federal organisations; USA; United States; public administration; public sector; learning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLC.2006.013909

International Journal of Learning and Change, 2006 Vol.1 No.4, pp.407 - 428

Published online: 03 Jun 2007 *

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