‘Hands up’: Mentoring in the New Zealand Public Service

Abstract

Mentoring is now widely accepted as a useful tool for helping individuals develop their careers, and for organizations to enhance their human resource capability. Using the results from the 2000 Career Progression Survey, this paper sketches the status and nature of mentoring evident in the New Zealand Public Service (NZPS). In particular, the survey results show that mentoring is now practiced throughout NZPS, and contrary to evidence elsewhere, women — specifically, women managers — are more likely to be mentored than their male counterparts. The paper also compares the survey results with existing jurisdictional and conceptual evidence, in particular on Hale's (1995) categorization of four sets of problems in mentoring. While evidence on two of the four questions (‘recognition’ and ‘mentor identification’) is corroborated in the NZPS, further inquiry is necessary on the ‘variance’ and ‘socialization’ problems.