Context: Mentoring plays a crucial role in helping employee development, engagement, and retention. In the automotive industry, where hierarchical structures and fast-paced innovation create a dynamic workplace culture, mentoring culture can support both personal growth and operational performance. Although mentoring programs are common, a thorough and consistent assessment of their impact remains lacking.

Problem: Organizations in the automotive sector often lack clear, validated metrics for assessing mentoring culture. Existing evaluation approaches are either too generic or insufficiently tailored to mentor and mentee roles and the different stages of the mentoring process. This gap hampers the ability to improve programs and demonstrate their strategic value.

Method: This study proposes a structured, context-sensitive approach to identifying relevant evaluation metrics. Using the FuzzyDelphi Method (FDM), expert consensus was collected from 35 participants(mentors and protégés) on 29 potential metrics categorized into thematic domains. These metrics were then conceptually mapped to the stages of the Dynamic Process Model (DPM) of mentoring to assess their relevance over time and role-specific applicability.

Results: The FDM analysis resulted in consensus on 14 of the 29 proposed items. High agreement was observed in three domains: MentoringCulture, Employee Engagement Social Support, and PersonalLearning Development. Notably, all items in the Program Evaluation Systematic Measurement domain were rejected, indicating a critical shortfall in the industry’s readiness or capacity to implement formalize devaluation processes. The results reveal that while the early and middle stages of mentoring (Initiation, Cultivation, Separation) are well-supported by evaluative metrics, the Redefinition stage lacks systematic assessment tools.

Contributes: This study contributes a filtered set of expert-endorsed evaluation metrics tailored to mentoring relationships in the automotive sector. It emphasizes the importance of aligning evaluation practices with mentoring stages and differentiating between mentor and mentee roles. The findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of current mentoring culture evaluation, offering a foundation for further research and implementation in industry-specific contexts.