Working Girl narrates about a secretary from New York, Tess McGill (played by Melanie Griffith), and her struggles to maneuver through and succeed in a big business venture. After her boss breaks a leg during a weekend, Tess starts working for another investment. There she meets Jack Trainer (played by Harrison Ford). She struggles with her professional shortcomings and the issues relating to her personal life after she finds out that her boyfriend betrayed her and she steadily falls in love with Jack.
In an organizational set up, many factors play a role in determining its level of development. For example, the interorganisational as well as intraorganisational ties play a significant role. Mentoring of the juniors by the senior members of any organization is one of the key issues that assist any company to develop through imparting skills and experience to the juniors. However, the mentorship process should not only be emphasized to emanate from the seniors to the juniors of the same organization but should also come from outside agencies to ensure that an individual acquires holistic experience.
The case of Tess McGill presents a compromised exposure to the infinite world of endless possibilities. All she gets from her relationships with her colleagues is more of harassment to her career than a benefit. For instance, Kevin Spacey treats her as a prostitute. From the insightful perspective offered by Higgins and Kram, Tess seems to have fallen in hands of sponsors rather than true mentors. Though she was provided with a lot of career support, her bosses neglected the psychosocial mentorship Tess required. Lack of this integrated mentorship process culminated into her getting into series of troubles which could hitherto be avoided if she had been holistically mentored. Tess McGill mentors ought to train her beyond the working program. For her to succeed, she needed to balance the effects of her work experience as well the psychosocial factors such as friendship, counseling, confirmation, and acceptance (Higgins & Kram, 2001).
A great mistake made by her mentor and owner of the executive business, Kathryn, was that she heavily relied on her ideas. Furthermore, she made them her own ones. Kathryn was always impressed by the ideas Tess had to a point that she was completely satisfied with her. Basing on the idea held by Higgins and Kram, this was a big compromise that would consequently affect the performance of any organization or firm. Hardly did she realize that consulting from outside agencies would assist Tess to be more exposed and experienced especially in highly competitive environments. This would assist organizations or firms to collect data regarding their competitors and help them to evaluate theirs in an attempt to improve on their performance. Diverse interaction would consequently help her to gather ideas that would be useful in ensuring that the business thrived (Higgins & Kram, 2001).
There was also lack of flexibility that would allow her gather ideas that would be useful to develop her input in the business. After Kathryn tells her that she is an excellent decision maker, she resolves to follow her own course in assisting the growth of the business. This was indeed a misinformed point of view since she could have heavily got a lot of advice from diverse sources to assist her to be more informed. Kathrin’s biggest mistake was that she already set the ball rolling for her business proposition. Hardly did Kathryn realize that sometimes the mentorship meant for the juniors might become complicated, especially when they are used to one mentor, the boss, due to the changing nature of the duties. There are times when the boss needs to change his/her duties and this will adversely affect his/her juniors if they are not trained to seek mentorship from external agencies. Her lack of exposure makes her be put at risk when Kathryn uses her own ideas to pull Trask and Jack at the expense of Tess. This would work to compromise Tess’s position.
Tess could be advised to strengthen some developmental networks to support her career. First, she should enhance the opportunistic development network. In this view, she should be ready and willing to receive advice from outside agencies to cater for her holistic development of her career. Second, she should strengthen her entrepreneurial development network. This will allow her to access diversified information from different sources that will allow her to be equipped in running business activities (Higgins & Kram, 2001).