	Kram distinguished between two main forms of support provided by mentors: psychosocial support, which refers to the provision of emotional support and encourages the development of the protégé’s professional identity and self-worth, and career support, which refers to the provision of challenging assignments, skill development, and visibility.  For protégés, career support is more strongly related to objective outcomes than psychosocial support, though all relationships are relatively weak. For subjective outcomes, the effects of career and psychosocial support are comparable, though psychosocial support is much more strongly related to satisfaction with one’s mentor than career support. For mentors, provisions of psychosocial and career support are similarly related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Providing career support is more strongly related to one’s own career success (broadly defined) than providing psychosocial support. In sum, providing and receiving mentoring is largely beneficial for both subjective and objective career outcomes.
	It is important to consider the directionality of these positive relationships, however, in light of findings regarding the individual-level antecedents of mentoring. That is, there are numerous protégé attributes that have been identified as predictors of seeking and receiving mentoring that are also related to the subjective and objective career success, either directly, or through other mediating factors. For example, a recent meta-analysis of individual, relational, and situational factors associated with receiving mentoring found numerous individual-level attributes that were associated with both psychosocial and career support, such as proactivity, external locus of control, emotional intelligence, learning goal orientation, and self-monitoring. These attributes are also known to predict numerous other career behaviors and outcomes in addition to mentoring. 
These individual-level antecedents influence the formation of informal mentoring relationships, which arise organically, but formal mentoring relationships, which are structured and assigned, are less influenced by person-level antecedents. Ragins and Cotton found that individuals with informal mentors viewed their mentors and more effective, received more psychosocial support, and had higher salaries than those in formal mentoring relationships. Eby et al. similarly found that informality was positively related to perceived instrumental support, perceived psychosocial support, and relationship quality. As above, one potential explanation for this difference is that the individuals who are more likely to seek out mentors are also more likely to benefit from them, and may also be more apt to engage in other proactive behaviors related to career outcomes. That is, the greater benefits observed for those who have informal mentors are not likely to derive from mentoring alone. Other research, however, has not found differences between formal and informal mentoring. These discrepant findings may be a result of the attributes of a given formal mentoring program, which may be more or less effective at creating successful mentoring pairs. 
