Inter-organizational mentoring (IOM) is a human resource development tool that is used when the mentor and mentee belong to different organizations. As mentees are the focus of the IOM process, the success of this type of program is highly reliant on their characteristics. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to derive the most desirable characteristics for mentees in IOM.
An intensive review of the literature on mentoring for managers and business professionals was carried out to identify mentee characteristics. These characteristics were then ranked for their importance to IOM using the Hybrid Delphi method (with 130 informants taking part in a Delphi survey and 19 expert IOM practitioners taking part in Focus Group and Nominal Group Technique sessions). An exploratory factor analysis identified the three main underlying factors behind the listed mentee characteristics.
In total, 17 relevant mentee characteristics were identified and ranked and then synthesized into three essential factors for the mentee. The results were discussed in the light of existing studies.
The mentee characteristics and factors identified in this study will be of great practical value to coordinators of IOM programs. Also, the review of the literature and the obtained results will help other researchers who wish to expand on this topic.
