The Dark Side of Mentoring: Explaining Mentor-on-Mentee Aggression

Recently available social scientific evidence suggests strongly that harmful aggressive behavior by mentors aimed at their mentees is a common occurrence in such relationships. This paper seeks to characterize such aggression and to account for its persistence by means of confluence of three etiological perspectives: ethological (mentoring as a form of "alloparenting" and as a form of coalition building), broadly evolutionary (aggression as a form of "handicap" attaching to the bonds that constitute mentoring coalitions), and psycho-dynamic (MOMA as a function of "normal narcissism"). The net result is that MOMA is an 'expectable' feature of most mentoring relationships.