Abstract
Mentoring has long been viewed as an effective tool for personal career and human resource development, and organizations and managers are advised to foster mentoring cultures. The argument advanced here is that mentoring may also entail detriments for organizations and, by consequence, society. Specifically, the following domains are examined: (1) evidence on the relationship of mentoring receipt with protégé job performance; (2) the mechanism via which mentoring enhances protégé career success, which appears to rely mostly on power and political processes; (3) the type of learning effected by mentoring, which is mostly associated with understanding power relationships along with improving the political skills of protégés; and (4) the possibility that mentoring may in a considerable number of cases harm protégés’ ethos and decrease their moral standards. After discussing the evidence on those four domains, the conclusion is that some caution - instead of unconditional enthusiasm - must be exercised with mentoring, while future research should be more balanced by awareness and exploration of its potentially detrimental aspects.