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.

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Mentoring relationships between research supervisors and doctoral students play a key role in doctoral students' success. Self-determination theory assumes that the quality of these relationships can be defined in terms of fulfillment of students' basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Studies on how supervisors and students build need-supportive relationships are, however, lacking. Taking a schema-based perspective, this article investigates supervisors' and doctoral students' (mis)alignments in schemas on how to fulfill students' basic needs in their relationship. Qualitative data were obtained from a sample of 18 interviews (nine dyads) to reveal the schema-driven sensemaking of students and their supervisors. Findings show that the idea of schema similarity might be too simple: For each of the three basic needs, tensions arise between students' and supervisors' schemas. These need-based schemas in action offer a fresh perspective for understanding why some supervisor-doctoral student relationships are experienced as successful while others are not.

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Research into workplace mentoring is primarily focused on the experiences and perceptions of individuals involved in the relationship, while there is scarcely any research focusing on the impact of mentoring relationships on their social environment. This exploratory research aims to give insight into how coworkers’ perceptions and experiences of informal mentoring relationships in their workgroup are related to their perceptions of workgroup functioning. The results of 21 semistructured interviews show that coworkers believe that mentoring relationships affect their workgroup’s functioning by influencing both their workgroup’s performance and climate. Coworkers applied an instrumental perspective and described how they think that mentoring relationships both improve and hinder their workgroup’s performance as they influence the individual functioning of mentor and protégé, the workgroup’s efficiency, and organizational outcomes. Furthermore, coworkers applied a relational perspective and described how mentoring relationships may influence their workgroup’s climate in primarily negative ways as they may be perceived as a subgroup, cause feelings of distrust and envy, and are associated with power issues. The results of this study emphasize the importance of studying mentoring relationships in their broader organizational context and set the groundwork for future research on mentoring relationships in workgroups.

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