Mentoring Across Family-Owned Businesses

Nearly three decades of research on mentoring has offered empirically supported processes in developing a mentoring relationship. Yet the application of mentoring within family businesses has received little exploration. Since much of the current mentoring literature is focused on general workplace mentoring, it is not clear how the multidimensional and interdependent systems within family businesses might complicate the translation of the existing literature to family business populations. This study examines interorganizational family business mentoring relationships to determine whether there are any issues which differentiate it from the existing mentoring research findings.