Abstract

Firms have recently employed digital reverse mentoring programs in which young and digitally affine employees are paired as mentors with mentees from senior management to foster their digital mindset. This paper sheds light into the outcomes and success factors of such reverse mentoring relationships by conducting a qualitative analysis of nine reverse mentoring pairs in four different organizations. Using an exploratory approach, we identified 31 different outcomes which are clustered along themes (e.g., technologies/trends or corporate culture), behavior (ranging from just creating awareness to sustainably changed behavior), and scope (ranging from personal to organization-wide impact). Moreover, we extracted success factors that showed to be important preconditions for making digital reverse mentoring successful.

Share

COinS
 

Turning Mentoring Around – A Case-based Analysis of the Outcomes of Digital Reverse Mentoring

Firms have recently employed digital reverse mentoring programs in which young and digitally affine employees are paired as mentors with mentees from senior management to foster their digital mindset. This paper sheds light into the outcomes and success factors of such reverse mentoring relationships by conducting a qualitative analysis of nine reverse mentoring pairs in four different organizations. Using an exploratory approach, we identified 31 different outcomes which are clustered along themes (e.g., technologies/trends or corporate culture), behavior (ranging from just creating awareness to sustainably changed behavior), and scope (ranging from personal to organization-wide impact). Moreover, we extracted success factors that showed to be important preconditions for making digital reverse mentoring successful.