The Double-Edged Power of Mentors: How Daily Feelings of Power Shape Mentees’ Experiences of Gender- and Race-Based Harm and Support

Power asymmetries shape everyday mistreatment in workplaces and academic training settings, yet little is known about how mentors' momentary feelings of power affect mentees' daily gender- and race-based experiences in real time. Drawing on power-approach and power-amplification theories, we propose that mentors' daily felt power simultaneously energizes sexy-powerful and responsibility-focused feelings and moral crediting beliefs that shape mentees' experiences of sexual harassment, racial mistreatment, and incivility (collectively, HARM) and allyship. In Study 1 of 100 working adults, we validated a brief daily measure of power and found that it activated sexy-powerful and communal feelings, which showed opposing links to sexual harassment intentions. In Study 2, daily surveys from 202 mentor–mentee dyads over 10 days showed that mentors' daily power increased sexy-powerful feelings, communal feelings, and moral crediting beliefs. Contrary to predictions, sexy-powerful feelings predicted lower HARM to mentees, whereas communal feelings and moral crediting beliefs predicted higher incivility—a key component of HARM; moral crediting beliefs also predicted greater allyship. Some effects were stronger for women mentors and varied with lab gender composition and climate. These findings suggest that mentor training should promote responsibility but with explicit self-regulation and accountability to guard against the paradoxical harmful effects of feeling powerful.