Research: How Men and Women Sponsor Junior Colleagues

"Sponsorship, or the act of using your own social capital to advocate for a junior employee, is often touted as a fix for inequities and key for fostering the talent pipeline. While it's true that most protégés generally benefit from receiving sponsorship, this relationship doesn't have to be only about the protégé. It can also present an opportunity for the sponsor to grow, allowing them to deepen and expand their own relationships with peers and senior leaders as they help connect a junior employee."

"Yet little research has studied how sponsorship impacts sponsors. Are some ways of sponsoring more conducive to win-win circumstances than others? Elizabeth L. Campbell is an assistant professor of management at Rady School of Management, UC San Diego. She researches gender inequity in career advancement. Catherine T. Shea is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD from Duke University. Her research focuses on social perception, goals and motivation, social networks, and gender."

Sponsorship involves using personal social capital to advocate for junior employees and is positioned as a remedy for workplace inequities and a way to strengthen the talent pipeline. Protégés typically receive clear benefits from sponsorship, but sponsors can also gain by expanding and deepening relationships with peers and senior leaders while facilitating connections for juniors. Evidence on how sponsorship affects sponsors is scarce, creating uncertainty about reciprocal outcomes. Important questions remain about which sponsorship practices produce mutually beneficial, win-win results versus those that primarily advantage protégés without meaningful sponsor gains.

Read at Harvard Business Review