A formal mentoring programme to align equity mandates with research outputs: A case study

To sustain research outputs while progressively ensuring that staff profiles reflect demographic realities, the College of Human Sciences at the institution under study embarked on a formal mentoring programme in April 2009. The focus of the programme is to mentor newcomers to academe by productive academics who will be retiring from the system over the following decade. The aim of the research was to investigate the functioning of the formal mentoring programme and to determine the extent to which the programme provided for research output opportunities after one year of implementation. A qualitative intrinsic case study approach was followed, employing document study and in-depth individual interviewing. It was found that planning had been thoroughly done and the formal mentoring programme was professionally implemented. Concerns about an initially too formalised approach were counteracted by building flexibility into the reporting on mentoring initiatives. A cost to mentoring was found to arise from the fast-tracking of unrealistic research output expectations