Relational Mentoring Episodes as a Catalyst for Empowering Protégés

We take empowerment from tasks to relationships by introducing the construct of psychological empowerment in the context of mentoring episodes. We introduce a new perspective for examining psychological empowerment, derived from a protégé’s perceptions of relational impact, developmental meaning, interpersonal competence, and relational self-determination arising out of relational mentoring episodes. Empowered protégés are expected to be more proactive in their careers. By applying an empowerment perspective to relational mentoring, we propose a conceptual model to investigate critical interpersonal processes and to discover more about how developmental relationships work. Finally, our aim is also to further our theoretical understanding of relational mentoring episodes. This new direction holds exciting implications for career scholarship, human resource development (HRD) practitioners, and employees.