Relationships Among White Supervisor Cultural Humility and Cultural Missed Opportunities and Minority Supervisee Self-Efficacy, Supervisory Working Alliance, and Racial Identity

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to examine how perceived supervisor cultural humility and cultural missed opportunities relate to supervisory working alliance and counselor self-efficacy in clinical supervision relationships where the supervisor is White and the supervisee is a racial minority. Cultural humility is defined as respect to and a lack of superiority toward another person’s culture and background. A cultural missed opportunity is defined as an opportunity to engage in cultural conversations being overlooked, avoided, or otherwise not discussed. Participants included supervisees who were: students/professionals from a mental health field (i.e. counseling psychology, clinical psychology, social work), who self-identified as a racial minority, and who had at least one clinical supervision experience with a White supervisor (N = 87). Using four hierarchical linear regressions the predictor variables (cultural humility and cultural missed opportunities) were used to examine the amount of variance predicted within the criterion variables (supervisory working alliance and counselor self-efficacy). Additionally, the moderating effect of racial identity was examined through each of the four regressions. The results indicated that perceived cultural humility and cultural missed opportunities account for a significant amount of variance in both supervisory working alliance and counselor self-efficacy. Racial identity accounted for a significant amount of variance in counselor self-efficacy. However, there was not a significant interaction between racial identity and either cultural humility or cultural missed opportunities in each of the four regression analyses.