This paper reviews the literature on informal mentoring at work. Based on two basic premises of interpersonal relationships, it discusses four promising areas in current mentoring research that could be cultivated further by future research. The first premise that we hold is that relationships never exist in a vacuum. Traditionally, however, mentoring literature has often overlooked the context of mentoring. We propose that the developmental network approach can be further extended to gather more insight into the interplay between mentoring dyads and their context. Also, mentoring literature could pay more attention to temporal influences in mentoring studies. The second premise that is applied is that relationships are not only instrumental in nature. However, mentoring research to date has mostly applied a one‐sided and transactional view to mentoring. Relational mentoring theory could be helpful in examining relational motivations of both members. Also, mentoring literature can achieve more explanatory power by examining the underlying mechanisms of mentoring, next to social exchange principles, that cause these developmental changes. In summary, in each of these four research areas, we identify and discuss fundamental questions and developments in research that can advance mentoring theory and practice.

PurposeIn an attempt to gain insight in the contribution of organizational communication to work perceptions, this paper investigates both direct and indirect relationships between supervisor communication and employees' affective organizational commitment. Regarding the indirect relationships, individual perceptions of person‐organization fit and organizational efficacy were included in the model as mediators.Design/methodology/approachA survey from a Dutch provider of telecommunication services (n=456) is analyzed on the relationships between communication, commitment and the proposed mediators, using regression analysis and a confirmatory structural equation model.FindingsBoth person‐organization fit and organizational efficacy were found to partly mediate the main effects of communication and affective commitment. Following the test of mediation of fit and efficacy one by one, a test of the two mediators simultaneously in a confirmatory structural equation model led to a fitting model without any modifications. Further, the most important aspects of communication between manager and employee turns out to be the feedback from the manager, followed by the notion of the manager listening to the employee.Research implications/limitationsGiven that the analyses are based on self‐report in one organization, these results have to be handled cautiously.Practical implicationsSupervisor communication strengthens commitment via a clear view of which values are important, which goals are to be achieved, and how efficacious the organization has been in the past.Originality/valueThe results show how communication – through the managers who are seen to represent the organization – can influence employees' perception of an organization's values and capabilities.

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Organizations have long been treated as stable and fixed entities, defined by concrete buildings, catchy names, and strategic goals neatly written on paper. The Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) school proposes an alternative, practice-grounded conceptualization for studying organizations as emerging in communicative (inter)actions. In so doing, CCO invites organizational scholars to trace back organizational phenomena to how they are communicated into existence. The concept of ventriloquism can help us explain the communicative constitutive view as it depicts how various elements of a situation are communicated into being and make a difference in interaction. However, ventriloquism lacks a proper methodological outline. Taking employee conversations about visions—a classic constituent of organizations—as our venue, we created a four-step framework for ventriloquial analyses and explored how visions are talked into existence. In this paper, we introduce and illustrate our analytical framework, showing how to identify, order, and present ventriloquial effects. We thus provide organizational (communication) scholars with a new methodological tool that facilitates the systematic inquiry into organizing and the organized from a communicative constitutive perspective.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether nonpaid volunteers have other reasons to be a member of an organization than paid workers. Volunteers are assumed to be hard to manage, because there is no ''stick of a paid contract'' to keep them in line. Therefore, we studied different dimensions (i.e., affective, normative, and continuance) of organizational commitment of volunteers and paid workers in a nonprofit organization. Further, we assessed whether the predictive power of the congruence between organizational and individual values for commitment differs between paid and unpaid workers. As expected, volunteers showed a significantly higher level of affective commitment to the organization, and lower levels of continuance commitment. Surprisingly, volunteers also showed a higher level of normative commitment than paid workers. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

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This study focuses on the perceptions of faculty members involved in a merger between two South African universities that were historically a ‘white’ and a ‘black’ institution. Combining a sensemaking approach and insights from social identity theory, the study aimed for a better understanding of the dynamics that underlie the processes of identification in organizational settings. Analysis of the transcripts of interviews and a focus group showed the importance of status differences, dominance, and several foci of identification. Surprisingly, employees from both merging partners claimed to be the dominated group in the merger and faculty members described their post‐merger identification in terms of their profession rather than their membership of the organization. These findings draw attention to the dynamic relationship between salient categories of identification.