Leaving Corporate Boundaries: Leveraging Mentors in Career Transitions to Entrepreneurship

This study explores the under-researched subject of the role of mentoring within and outside of organizational boundaries, as individuals make the transition from corporate careers to starting their own businesses. Answering calls for more qualitative, inductive research on entrepreneurial network relationships, we completed structured, in-depth interviews with twenty-four men and women who recently left management positions to pursue entrepreneurial career paths. Building on a social capital perspective, we found that mentoring relationships with structural, relational and cognitive embeddedness were most likely to transfer from the individual’s corporate career to their new venture. We also found support for both the recent literature on multiple mentors and for gender differences in the patterns of these mentoring relationships. This study has important implications for the growing number of individuals interested in opting out of corporate positions to start their own ventures as well as implications for future research directions on mentoring and careers.