Broadening international mentoring: contexts and dynamics of expatriate and HCN intercultural mentoring

PurposeTo enlarge the focus on international mentoring beyond traditional company-assigned expatriates, this conceptual paper examines important contexts and dynamics of intercultural mentoring involving traditional expatriates and host country nationals (HCNs), with both as mentors and mentees.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper explores how intercultural mentoring in different contexts can guide the individual professional development of expatriates and HCNs, and in doing so, contributes to MNC knowledge management and organization development.FindingsMajor contributions of this paper include increased attention to the role of culture in mentoring, and an illumination of important intercultural mentoring opportunities and imperatives involving traditional company-assigned expatriates and HCNs, who are key global talent players in MNC knowledge management and overall operations performance. This paper also provides practical recommendations on how organizations can facilitate mentoring within a global context, as well as suggestions for viable avenues for future research, including further extending the global talent reach of international mentoring.Originality/valueThis paper emphasizes the importance of taking the intercultural context into account when planning and managing mentoring in MNCs and outlines how culture can affect mentoring relationships involving traditional company-assigned expatriates and HCNs. This contextual aspect has often been neglected in the extant literature, yet can be crucial for the success of mentoring relationships that cross cultural borders. With its inclusion of HCNs, this paper also expands the picture of international mentoring beyond the traditional focus on company-assigned expatriates.

Critical Intercultural Mentoring and Allying

In this essay, we write about our collaborative experiences with faculty mentoring/allying relationships using autoethnography. From two different locations of academic faculty standing, we articulate that faculty mentoring/allying relationships can be sites of critical intercultural communication praxis in which differences informed by historical and existing power relations are productively discussed and acknowledged. However, these are easier to talk about than to practice. Thus, we share our continuing struggle to complicate the notion of faculty mentoring/allying and offer our experiences as complex, fluid, multiple, and contextual productions and constitutions of differences.