ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the difficult side of some mentorships with emphasis on how to recognize evidence of disturbance, conceptualize the source of disturbance and most important, go about correcting the relational course when possible or gracefully ending the relationship when it is not. The chapter offers a strategy for successfully managing irrational mentoring beliefs and also offers a typology of the sources of mentorship dysfunction. Whatever the source of mentorship dysfunction, the relationship is no longer functioning effectively from the perspective of mentor, mentee, or both. A common and insidious source of mentorship dysfunction is simple incompatibility in important traits, preferences, or developmental stages. Early research on mentors and mentees in and business settings typically employed very small samples of extremely well-educated professionals engaged in enduring and successful mentor-mentee relationships. A prevailing and utterly unsupportable notion in the mentoring literature is that higher education faculty are nearly always to blame when things go wrong in an academic mentorship.
