Mentors Gone Wild! When Mentoring Relationships Become Dysfunctional Or Abusive

Early research on mentoring has focused primarily on the benefits and positive aspects of the mentoring experience. In the past decade, however, research has begun to examine the negative aspects or "dark side" of mentoring and some of the dysfunctional consequences of bad mentoring relationships. In this chapter, we develop a conceptual model of negative mentoring. We examine the characteristics of mentors as well as proteges and discuss how individual characteristics and a dyadic mismatch may lead to unmet expectations. These unmet expectations are argued to affect relational problems and perceived injustice which, in turn, affect the degree to which these relationships can escalate into riot only dysfunctional, but abusive, mentoring relationships.