ABSTRACT
Mentoring is not a new concept. Formal mentoring dates back to Greek mythology when Athena, “the goddess of wisdom and skill, came back to earth and took the form of man, Mentor, to assist a young man facing perceived differences” (Bruce, 1995, p. 139). Since then, the concept of mentoring has been adopted by many different disciplines including business, industry, and education. There is widespread agreement among scholars that mentoring is valuable in a variety of circumstances and for different purposes (Buell, 2004). But because of the multiple settings in which mentoring occurs, there is no single, unifying, operational defi nition of the process (Jacobi, 1991; Mueller, 2004; Wilde & Shau, 1991).
