Executive Summary Mentoring has been identified as an effective means of leadership development in organizations. This paper presents a theory of mentoring that proposes that effective mentorship fundamentally depends on the mentor's ability to help solve various complex social problems that arise in the protégé's career. The social judgment capacities (e.g., wisdom, social perceptiveness, moral and social reasoning) that enable complex social problem solving in a mentoring context are discussed. A framework of relationships between social judgment capacity, mentoring functions and protégé outcomes is presented along with implications of these observations for mentoring research and for development of human potential in organizations.
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