Mentoring is an age-old practice that proves meaningful for proteges across contexts and program designs. Because both mentoring practice and mentoring research take place in a wide variety of domains and with seemingly limitless program details, it has become difficult to define or execute with any precision. Mentoring practitioners and researchers would benefit greatly from a mentorship model to inform their program designs and selection of mentoring type best-suited to the situation. In recent years, a type of mentoring that has gained popularity is flash mentorship. This short-term, one-time interaction is desirable because of the limited commitment required for everyone involved. However, little is known about the effectiveness of this type of mentorship. The current work sought to develop a model of effective flash mentorship with the broader goal of establishing best practices for pairing mentors with proteges in meaningful ways. A proposed model of flash mentorship posited that relationship quality and advice quality predicted protege situational satisfaction. Antecedents of relationship quality were posited to include attraction and deep-level similarity. Antecedents of advice quality were posited to include message features and mentor expertise. Although all causal links posited by the model were of sufficient magnitude to be consistent with predictions, the fit of the model proved insufficient. Limitations of the findings and recommendations for future research are discussed.
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