ABSTRACT
An organization’s expert employees can be regarded as its social capital. Both macro and micro economic factors are forcing organizations to think harder about their social capital. Labour and product market trends suggest that expert employees are becoming scarce and increasingly important to business organizations. Collective bargaining and personnel functions deal largely with employee social welfare problems, and operate by reacting to problems. Mentoring research has focused on one-to-one relationships between two individuals, a protege and a mentor. The only potential source of personal help which proteges rate less helpful than their assigned mentors is professional bodies. Motorola, the third largest electronics company in the United States, has one of the longest established planned mentoring programmes in the world. In 1980 mentoring at Motorola was given high visibility, supported by both the corporate leadership and the communications sector’s management, in particular by George Fisher, then the general manager of the Boynton Beach paging facility.
