Abstract: Abstract Mentoring is a pivotal Human Resource Development (HRD) strategy that serves as effective career development and employee training tools (Hegstad, 1999). The study of mentoring typically considers a mentoring relationship as a one-on-one relationship involving a more experienced mentor helping a less experienced protégé to obtain knowledge and skills for the protégé’s professional and personal growth (Mullen, 1994; Myers & Humphreys, 1985). Regardless of whether a mentoring relationship is formal and monitored by the organization (Kram & Bragar, 1992), or informal and develops spontaneously (Ragins & Cotton, 1999), it has been found to be beneficial for both organizations and individual employees by improving the quality of human resources (Thurston. et al., 2012). While deemed beneficial, research also suggests that traditional mentoring models are embedded with power dynamics that continue the production of inequity (McGuire & Reger, 2003). This is particularly evident in mentoring relationships across social identity groups. For example, racial and gender differences have been found to critically shape mentoring relationships, in which, racial dynamics are particularly volatile for women of color (Thomas, 1989). In addition, the benefits of mentoring tend to vary enormously between employees with different genders. Women mentors and protégés are likely to face more difficulties than men as they try to engage in mentoring relationships (Ragins & Cotton, 1999). In fact, researchers found that women mentors’ constrained organizational power limits their contribution to career functions. However, ironically, they are expected to provide more psychological support for protégés (O’Brien et al., 2010) since gender stereotypes see women should be more nurturing than men (Griffin & Reddick, 2011). Furthermore, additional research highlights the challenges in accurately assessing mentor success due to fear of retaliation (Burk & Eby, 2010). White supremacy culture (WSC) provides a critical lens to rethink the inequity issues identified within traditional mentoring models. Martínez (2004) defines white supremacy as “a historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression” by white people for the purpose of maintaining wealth, power, and privilege (p. 53). Based on this definition, social activist scholar Tema Okun, proposed the concept of White Supremacy Characteristics (WSC), which “incorporates a complex weave of oppression by race, class, gender, sexuality designed to serve the elite few at the expense of most” and leads to toxic constructs of “normal” (Okun, 2000, p. 7). WSC provides a nuanced lens to understanding the ways in which traditional mentoring relationships implies a hierarchical ordering, which makes power, resources, and help flow only from the mentor to the protégé (McGuire & Reger, 2003) may exacerbate white supremacy thinking and, ultimately, reinforce oppression and discrimination. Given that WSC is likely to be embedded in traditional mentoring models, mentoring has yet to be implemented to unleash its fullest potential. In this research, we present a new framework of co-mentoring, that centers WSC in addressing many of the power-based inequities prevalent in traditional mentoring forms. With a norm of equality and shared power, co-mentoring emphasizes a partnership effort between the mentor and the protégé toward shared purpose and commitment (C. A. Mullen, 2000). Unlike traditional mentoring relationships, a co-mentoring relationship encourages everyone involved to occupy the role of both teacher and learner (McGuire & Reger, 2003). Since all participants are assumed to have valuable resources to share in this relationship, co-mentoring challenges the paternalism of WSC and serves as an effective means of promoting equity in organization and individual development processes. The value of Critical HRD (CHRD), according to Byrd (2018), is to “invoke a sense of moral agency and responsiveness within the HRD community ” (p. 3). As such and due to its focus on uncovering the tensions, assumptions, paradoxes and challenges within HRD, CHRD is situated to be a prime location for this research. While there exist minimal literature examining co-mentoring in CHRD, we will show that elements of co-mentoring do exist in HRD. Similarly, though a very limited amount of CHRD research explicitly names WSC, we argue that CHRD still presents an opportunity to further examine WSC due to its inclusion of many parallel streams that run adjacent to and share many commonalities with WSC (eg. anti-racism, anti-oppression, organizational justice, etc.). This study will incorporate critical, interdisciplinary insights from WSC, mentoring, and co-mentoring literatures to articulate a framework for the discipline of HRD to consider for its critical scholarship on mentorship. By proposing this new framework it is our hope to help build a more radical discipline and contribute to CHRD’s growing research interests in exploring systems of oppression within organizations.
