Interestingly, a collective model of mentoring in which a whole group is mentored is more powerful because of the alliances that are built within a group of people with similar interests. In this model, the emphasis is on the process and not the person, and on the relationships, not the performance. The responsibility of mentoring may be distributed among several people. It has been argued that distributed mentoring is more successful in the workplace and individuals who have multiple sources of support fare better than those who do not. Collective mentoring should however not be confused with peer mentoring which conceptually is a weak form of mentoring since there are difficulties in the concept and practice of peer learning if ‘peer’ means equal in status and knowledge. More research is needed to examine how multiple mentors and multiple kinds of mentorship can aid a trainee’s socialization.
Designing Human Resource Management Systems: A Leader’s Guide by Jayant Mukherjee