Racial microaggressions and its impact on supervisees of color in cross-racial counseling supervision

Abstract

Supervision is considered to be a primary method of clinical instruction (Holloway, 1992), which serves as a foundation to train supervisees and to ensure the provision of appropriate and culturally sensitive client care. While the representation of supervisees of color in the field of psychology is continuing to increase, it appears important to recognize multicultural issues (e.g., racial microaggressions) as it exists and/or emerges in cross-racial supervision. Although less is known about how racial microaggressions influence supervisees of color, the purpose of this study was to investigate how experiences of racial microaggressions affects the supervisory working alliance, their perceptions of their supervisors’ multicultural competence, and supervisee outcome variables (i.e., counseling and multicultural counseling self-efficacy) in cross-racial supervision. The results showed that perceived supervisor multicultural competence partially mediated the relationship between racial microaggressions and supervisory working alliance. Both, supervisory working alliance and perceived supervisor multicultural competence fully mediated the relationship between racial microaggressions and multicultural counseling self-efficacy. However, no support for the mediation was found in this sample for counseling self-efficacy. Limitation, implications and future directions are discussed.