Early-Stage Investigators and Institutional Interface: Importance of Organization in the Mentoring Culture of Today’s Universities

Mentors have an active role in teaching mentees to scan their academic environments for the resources to advance their research careers, to assess the gaps between what’s available and needed to succeed, and to develop strategies to fill these gaps. Yet achieving instrumentality is a necessary, but insufficient condition by which to accomplish the desired endpoints. Mentors and mentees must recognize that the organizations to which they belong are cultural in nature: characterized by vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits. Understanding the collective behaviors and assumptions of peers and leaders in terms of the shared perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of organizational membership is essential to success. Institutions, in turn, must examine the extent to which they offer action possibilities: opportunities that promote the developmental trajectories of early stage investigators-in-training. Lack of awareness of the possible dissonance of this reality adversely affects many young faculty members.