Mentoring

Mentoring is the act of providing resources to encourage healthy growth. Mentoring can involve individual relationships ranging from a casual offer of advice up to an apprentice relationship. Mentoring implicitly involves expectations; both the mentor and the mentee should have realistic and well understood goals for the timing and product of the relationship. The ethics of one-on-one mentoring involves how the mentoring expectations are formulated and met.

Working in a mentoring atmosphere can be as important as the availability of one-on-one help. Group leaders, from department chairs to research directors, have an ethical obligation to create an environment that supports fair treatment and professional development opportunities for all group members. With such broad ethical responsibility, mentoring issues can overlap with issues of bias, health and safety, and maintaining the intrinsic ethical standards of the discipline.

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