Mentoring and Cultural Dimensions

Challenges of Managing People: Mentoring Programs | |

In every continent, practitioners proclaim the belief that people are the bedrock of success in schools and colleges.....leading to a greater emphasis on the effective management of people. (Foskett & Lumby 2003: 61)

Managing teachers to facilitate effective learning can be both rewarding and challenging. A teacher mentoring program, when implemented successfully, is one particular management tool that can bring both personal and organizational rewards. However, implementing such a program effectively is challenging. One notable challenge appears to be the correlation between the inherent cultural background (see footnote) of a mentor/mentee (see footnote) and the necessary characteristics and qualities required by a mentor/mentee, as recognized and generally accepted by informed research, to make such a program successful. Although many researchers discuss the challenges of cross-cultural mentoring (see Shore et al, 2008. St Claire-Oswald, 2007), my aim is to draw attention to the challenges that culture in general may pose when implementing a teacher mentoring program.
|The terms ‘societal culture’ or ‘national culture’ will be expressed solely as ‘culture’ unless indicated otherwise. |
|The terms ‘mentee’ and ‘protégé’ are interchangeable throughout this paper. |

These cultural challenges, in relation to the qualities needed for mentors/mentees, will be analyzed in light of both Hoefstede’s and Dimmock & Walker’s work on cultural dimensions. While my aim is not to contrast and compare certain cultures and whether one is deemed more or less likely to succeed in a mentoring program than the other, I do wish to briefly analyze the challenges educational managers in Hong Kong may encounter in their attempts to develop such a program, as well as their

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