Layered Cultural Processes: The Relationship Between Multicultural Orientation and Satisfaction With Supervision

Supervision has been called the “signature pedagogy” of psychotherapy, and recent literature has emphasized the importance of multicultural processes in supervision. Despite the recent advances in the area of multicultural orientation, much of the existing work on the application of multicultural orientation to clinical supervision, however, has been conceptual rather than empirical. In the present study, we extended the multicultural orientation framework (MCO) to the context of supervision. In a sample of therapist trainees (N = 123), supervisor cultural humility and cultural (missed) opportunities were significantly associated with supervisees’ satisfaction with supervision, but only as it pertained to the supervisee’s cultural context; supervisor cultural humility and opportunities associated with supervisees’ clients’ cultural contexts were not significantly related to supervisees’ satisfaction. Thus, supervisors’ cultural humility attending to cultural opportunities within the supervisory relationship was positively related to supervisees’ satisfaction with supervision. Implications and recommendations for research and education/training will be discussed.