Research on factors affecting knowledge transfer in mentoring process

Abstract

Mentor programs are efficient, inexpensive and tailored ways of transferring knowledge from experts to less experienced employees. We put forward a conceptual model of affecting the knowledge transfer and creation in mentoring process and research numerically how the overlapping knowledge and the heterogeneous knowledge between mentor and mentee influence the performance of transfer activities, such as the quantity of the transferred knowledge and the increment of the created knowledge. We find that the moderate overlapping knowledge and heterogeneous knowledge between mentor and mentee are very important for the enhancement of the performance of transfer activities, that is to say the more transferred knowledge from mentor to mentee, the more effective knowledge creation becomes. The findings suggest a number of key factors that can affect knowledge transfer success, with suggestions for making a good pair of mentor-mentee and knowledge management. The authors would like to thank the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fund of Ministry of Education of China under Grant No. 10YJA630082 for the financial supports.