Abstract
This study investigated what helped and what hindered in cross-cultural supervision. The participants were 25 visible minority graduate students and early counseling professionals. They were individually interviewed according to an expanded version of Flanagan’s critical incident technique. The most frequently cited positive themes were subsumed in five key areas: (a) personal attributes of the supervisor, (b) supervision competencies, (c) mentoring, (d) relationship, and (e) multicultural supervision competencies. The most frequently reported negative themes were grouped into five areas: (a) personal difficulties as a visible minority, (b) negative personal attributes of the supervisor, (c) lack of a safe and trusting relationship, (d) lack of multicultural supervision competencies, and (e) lack of supervision competencies. The results support a person-centered mentoring model of effective supervision.
Keywords
Multicultural competence has been benchmarked as one of the core areas in clinical supervision (Falender & Shafranske, 2007; Fouad et al., 2009). Recent research has shown that multicultural competence in supervision can affect the quality of supervision (Arthur & Collins, 2009; Inman, 2006). But few studies have directly examined minority students’ perceptions and experiences in multicultural supervision situations (Dickson, Argus-Calvo, & Tafoya, 2010; Jernigan, Green, Helms, Perez-Gualdron, & Henze, 2010; Kaduvettoor et al., 2009).
Bernard and Goodyear (1998) identified two major goals for supervision: teaching-learning and monitoring, representing the instructional and evaluative functions of supervision. However, the psychosocial or relational functions are inherent in supervision and the quality of the supervision relationship is related to the “supervisee’s perceived safety, trust and alliance” (Hernández, Taylor, & McDowell, 2009, p. 89). The present research explored both positive and negative experiences of visible minority students employing an expanded version of Flanagan’s (1954) critical incident technique (CIT) (Wong, Wong, & Ishiyama, in press).
Person-Centered Mentoring Model
To complement the competence framework, we propose a mentoring model rooted in a person-centered approach to supervision, which has long been recognized as one of the major models in supervision (Goodyear, Abadie, & Efros, 1984; Thomas, 2010). The positive and holistic approach of the person-centered mentoring model (PMM) has the following benefits: (a) Empathy, unconditional positive regard, and genuineness (congruence) build a climate of personal safety and trust, (b) these conditions give supervisees a voice with regard to their cultures and beliefs, (c) the non-directive approach facilitates self-actualization and self-evaluation (Lambers, 2007; Patterson, 1983; Villas-Boas Bowen, 1986), and (d) mentoring facilitates trainees’ personal and professional development.
Mentoring is an intentional activity (Johnson, 2002); to become a mentor, supervisors need to willingly serve as a role model beyond the formal supervision responsibilities (Hernández et al., 2009, p. 89). Allen and Poteet (2011) defined mentoring as a developmental relationship between a more senior individual and a less experienced one. Mentoring is inherently developmental because it provides the needed guidance and support for every stage of professional development across the life span (Carmin, 1988). Most definitions of mentoring characterize it as “intensive caring” to promote the personal and professional development of a less experienced person (Hansman, 2001).
Mentoring has long been recognized as an informal but effective way to help trainees grow professionally (Black, Suarez, & Medina, 2004; Carmin, 1988; Green & Bauer, 1995; Rakin, 1991; Tentoni, 1995). The need for mentoring has been mentioned repeatedly in counseling education and clinical supervision (Casto, Caldwell, & Salazar, 2005; Clark, Harden, & Johnson, 2000).
Haber (1996, cited in Jones, 1998) pointed out that a supervisor serves the following functions or roles: education, administration, consultation, facilitation, evaluation, and mentoring. Thus, mentoring has been identified as a unique component, consistent with the PMM. Based on her extensive review of the literature, Jones (1998) has also identified positive characteristics of mentoring, such as providing a safe atmosphere, openness to feedback about own style of relating, significant investment of time, and taking a keen interest in trainees’ learning.
What Constitutes Effective Supervision?
Hutt, Scott, and King (1983) examined both the positive and negative experiences of supervisees. A phenomenological methodology was employed. The results showed that positive and negative experiences were not opposites but had their own unique meaning structures. Effective supervision involved both task- and person-oriented behaviors. The positive supervisor–supervisee relationship “embodies warmth, acceptance, respect, understanding, and trust” (p. 120). Such personal attributes of the supervisor are consistent with the PMM.
Henderson, Cawyer, and Watkins (1997) compared practicum students’ and supervisors’ perceptions of effective supervision. The overarching categories identified by students as contributing to effective supervision were (a) competence—general levels of knowledge, (b) competence—facilitation of learning, (c) relationship factors, and (d) effectiveness of evaluation. The four overarching categories identified by supervisors as contributing to effective supervision were (a) students’ development, (b) relationship factors, (c) ethics, and (d) adaptability. Thus, competence and relationship ranked high for both students and faculty. Supervisees also cited trust, encouragement, acceptance, and respect—qualities that reflect the characteristics of the supervisor as a person, providing further support to the PMM.
The PMM emphasizes both the psychosocial and professional aspects of effective supervision. It incorporates most of the roles and functions of effective supervisors, such as support, befriending, teaching, coaching, modeling, caring, and encouraging. As a general model, the PMM has the advantage of being parsimonious, comprehensive, and readily applicable. Practicing the PMM also reduces the likelihood of harmful supervision, when corrective actions are carried out within a caring, supportive, and trusting relationship.
In Asia, mentoring is widely practiced and respected, reflecting Confucius’ influence on the teacher–student relationship. In fact, the teacher is regarded as shifu, which in Chinese literally means teacher–father, who cares about the students. All three authors of this article have both benefited from mentoring and practiced mentoring with their students. China emphasizes the positive effect of mentoring in career development (Gong, Chen, & Lee, 2011), teacher training (Lee & Feng, 2007), job performance and career satisfaction (Pan, Sun, & Chow, 2011), and postgraduate education (Leong, 2010). Thus, a mentoring approach to supervision can be especially effective in working with Asian students.
What Constitutes Inadequate or Harmful Supervision?
In recent years, bad supervision has received increasing attention (e.g., Ellis et al., 2010; Goodyear, Bunch, & Claiborn, 2005). There are legal and ethical issues when supervisors fail to carry out their educational and gate-keeping functions (Guest & Dooley, 1999; Tannenbaum & Berman, 1990; Thomas, 2010). Bad or harmful supervision is invariably a betrayal of trust.
Both positive and negative perceptions of multicultural supervisory experiences can affect the quality of supervision (McLeod, 2009; Pope-Davis, Toporek, & Ortega-Villalobos, 2003). McLeod (2009) conducted a phenomenological investigation of supervisors’ and supervisees’ experiences with respect to cultural issues in multicultural supervision. Themes associated with the effect of positive experiences include cohesion/bonding, safety, and awareness, implicating the importance of the PMM. Themes associated with the effect of negative experiences include supervisee withdrawal and decreased feelings of competence and improvement.
The present study investigated what helped and what hindered in cross-cultural supervision, because all the participants were visible minorities whereas the supervisors were Caucasians.
Method
In the spirit of Flanagan’s (1954) emphasis on objectivity, participants were told, “The main objective of supervision is to develop supervisees’ professional competence in the practice of counseling. Please describe specific incidents or examples of helpful and unhelpful supervision.” They were also told, “Think of a time when a supervisor has done or said something that you felt was an example of effective (or ineffective) supervision. Please explain why you judge that to be a helpful (or unhelpful) incident.” The researcher continued to ask for additional examples until the participants were not able to think of any more helpful or unhelpful incidents. We adopted an expanded version of the critical incident technique (Butterfield, Borgen, Amundson, & Maglio, 2005; Wong et al., in press), which asks additional questions such as, What happened? What led up to it? What was the consequence or how did it turn out?
Recruitment of Participants
Participants were recruited from the counseling psychology departments of five Canadian universities and two universities in the United States through the authors’ personal and professional networks. Potential participants needed to meet the following criteria: (a) being a visible minority, (b) having had at least 1 year of supervision experience either currently or very recently, and (c) being able to articulate their supervision experience. As a result, 19 women and 6 men were recruited. The average ages for the women and the men were 32 and 37 years, respectively. In terms of ethnic membership, there were 13 Chinese-Canadians, 4 Indo-Canadians, 3 First Nations, 2 Japanese-Canadians, 1 Afro-Canadian, 1 Korean-Canadian, and 1 Latin-Canadian. In terms of levels of training, 3 were completing their master’s degrees, 18 had just graduated with their master’s, 1 was a doctoral candidate, and 3 had recently received their doctorate degrees.
Procedure
All potential participants were first contacted by telephone and were informed about the purpose of the study. Then, the interviewer proceeded with the interview, which was audio recorded. At the end of the interview, the tape was transcribed verbatim and given an identification code.
Data Collection and Content Analysis
The recorded interviews were coded and transcribed verbatim. The following procedure was employed to extract themes from the protocols:
The researcher read over several transcripts to get a sense of the scope and variety of the interview materials.
Both positive and negative incidents were identified and marked along the left margin of the transcript. Two criteria were used to identify each critical incident: (a) The description of the incident was complete in the sense of having a beginning and an end, and (b) the incident was clearly related to supervision.
Each report of a critical incident typically consisted of several meaning units, which were similar to Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman’s (1959) thought units. A meaning unit must contain a complete and clear idea marked by a transition in meaning (Aanstoos, 1983; Giorgi, 1975). A meaning unit was considered relevant if it had a direct bearing on supervision. Similar meaning units were combined. Finally, themes were then extracted by favoring those with general applications. For more details of the procedure, please refer to Wong et al. (in press).
The coding was done by the researcher and one of her thesis supervisors in a collaborative manner. Given that the coding procedure was very time-consuming and it required expert knowledge of both the content of clinical supervision and the methodology of qualitative research, the present procedure of coding was the best possible for a doctoral dissertation.
Results
A total of 150 positive incidents and 191 negative incidents was identified. For the 19 female participants, the mean numbers of positive incidents and negative incidents were 6.2 and 8.3, respectively. For the 6 male participants, the mean numbers of positive and negative incidents were 5.5 and 5.7, respectively. Collapsing across genders, the average number of positive incidents per participant was 6.0, and the average number of negative incidents was 7.6.
Themes of Positive Incidents
A total of 340 meaning units was related to positive critical incidents. Twenty themes were extracted from these units. Frequency and participation rates for each theme are shown in Table 1. Frequency refers to the number of meaning units per theme; participation rate refers to the number and percentage of participants reporting a particular theme.
Themes of Positive Incidents
The number of participants reporting each theme is given in the Participation column, with the participation rate given in parentheses.
The number of meaning units cited for each theme is given in the Frequency column, with the percentage of the total number of meaning units given in parentheses.
Themes of Negative Incidents
There was a total of 386 meaning units related to negative incidents. Fifteen themes were extracted from these meaning units. The frequency and participation rates for each theme are shown in Table 2.
Themes of Negative Incidents
The number of participants reporting each theme is given in the Participation column, with the participation rate given in parentheses.
The number of meaning units cited for each theme is given in the Frequency column, with the percentage of the total number of meaning units given in parentheses.
These negative themes reveal not only the causes and nature of negative incidents but also a wide range of negative experiences and feelings. Several participants suffered severe emotional pains related to their experience in supervision. Many had serious doubts about whether they were in the right profession and seriously considered quitting the counseling program.
Reliability and Validity
For a good discussion on the complicated issues concerning reliability and validity in CIT, please read Butterfield et al. (2005). For the present study, we prefer a positivistic approach. An expert in supervision research, a doctoral student in counseling psychology, and a visible minority student in counseling psychology were asked to serve as judges concerning classification of positive and negative incidents. Overall percentage of agreement was consistently more than 80%.
To test for validity, confirmation was carried out by a subsample of participants who were asked to indicate whether the categories have accurately captured their experiences in supervision. In cross-researcher validation, categories of themes were compared to the supervision literature as is done in the Discussion section. For details of these procedures, see Wong et al. (in press).
Discussion
Given the scope and richness of the present findings, we will focus on themes with high participation rates and discuss their implications for effective cross-cultural supervision. In order to maintain the voice of the participants, their statements were quoted verbatim, including grammatical errors.
Themes of Positive Critical Incidents
The 20 positive themes mapped out the characteristics of helpful or good multicultural supervision. By and large, the results are consistent with the literature on effective supervision. The themes with the highest participation rates and frequencies were grouped into four broad categories: (a) relationship, (b) competence, (c) personal attributes, and (d) mentoring.
Relationship
The importance of the supervisor–supervisee relationship is supported by the following themes: “Supervisor provided a safe, trusting environment” (56% participation rate), “Supervisor treated me with respect” (36%), and “Allowed me the freedom to take risks and gave me space to grow” (36%). The results of the study have provided additional support of the well-established fact that a trusting, supportive relationship is important (Heppner & Roehlke, 1984; Hunt, 1986; Hutt et al., 1983; Worthen & McNeill, 1996). Also consistent with the PMM, Ronnestad and Skovholt (1993) concluded that respect, empathy, and trust are essential for supervision just as much as they are for counseling. One of the participants gave an example illustrating the development of trust through self-disclosure: “He always shared with me . . . not only the level of how to handle the case. Also how he incorporated his personal experiences and all that and shared it with me.”
Competence
This area includes professional competence in teaching and guidance as well as multicultural competence. “Supervisor provided timely, clear, constructive feedback, guidance and debriefing” has the second highest overall participation rate (72%). Other competence-related themes include “Supervisor taught me lessons, skills, insights, and explained things to me” (52%), “Supervisor demonstrated, modeled and role-played” (36%), and “Group supervision was beneficial” (8%). These present findings are consistent with a large literature on the importance of competence in supervisory tasks (Bernard & Goodyear, 1998; Henderson et al., 1997; Holloway, 1995).
However, professional competence involves more than the ability to teach, guide, and evaluate. It also involves modeling professionalism in handling cases and relating to others in the mental health field. Four participants reported the theme “Supervisor was professional and ethical in handling cases” (16%). As an example, one participant stated, “She helped me because her manner of professionalism . . . really motivated me to enhance those areas in myself.”
Thirteen participants reported the theme “Supervisor/professor had cross-cultural competencies.” A male participant reported, “They appreciate the culture I come from. . . . She’s very experienced in cross cultural counseling although she’s Caucasian. She has a very, very solid knowledge of these things.”
Personal attributes of the supervisor
The theme with the highest participation rate refers to personal attributes of the supervisor: “Supervisor was appreciative, accepting, supportive, encouraging and validating” (80%). Another personal theme was “Supervisor was flexible, open-minded and receptive to student feedback and suggestions” (16%). Twenty of the 25 participants reported at least one positive experience of having a supervisor who was appreciative, accepting, supportive, encouraging, or validating.
Mentoring
Whereas others have implicated the importance of mentoring in supervision (Daniels, D’Andrea, & Kim, 1999; McNeill, Hom, & Perez, 1995), the present study provides direct evidence on the importance of mentoring in effective supervision from the perspective of visible minority students. Mentoring emerged as a major theme (64% participation rate), even though mentoring was never mentioned throughout the interview process. In several cases, the supervisees actually reported that the supervisors treated her or him as a protégé. One participant said, “He just give [sic] us so many opportunities to grow. . . . That’s what I mean when I say he’s a mentor.” Another participant said, “She called me her protégé. . . . She did pay attention to where I was at.” A mentor takes an active interest in a supervisee’s personal and professional development. A mentor plays a variety of roles, including advisor, teacher, colleague, and friend (Swerdlik & Bardon, 1988). In sum, the theme encompasses all aspects of the multidimensional mentoring process (Carmin, 1988; Jacobi, 1991).
Several new findings
The theme “Clients were accepting and helpful” proved to be a very encouraging experience for visible minority students. This can be partially attributed to the good nature of some clients, but it can also be partially attributed to minority trainees’ ability and resourcefulness to be effective despite their language handicap.
Ten participants reported the theme “Experienced personal growth through negative experiences” (40%). One participant said, “I think that incident [of discrimination] taught me a lot about who I was, who other people are, what this world is about and how do I go about approaching this . . . learning how to love people despite differences and beliefs and personalities.”
It is worth noting that many participants were able to develop greater self-understanding and empathy and became more motivated to achieve success following a negative supervision experience. This theme “Spiritual transformation” also suggests the potential for spiritual growth in adversity. Both of these themes reflect the resilience and resourcefulness of minority trainees.
Three of the participants reported the theme “Minority status served as an asset” under certain conditions. For example, some mental health agencies would accept visible minority interns to make them “politically correct.” In some cases, minority students were valued because they could better meet the needs of minority clients.
Themes of Negative Critical Incidents
Fifteen themes were extracted from 386 meaning units related to negative critical incidents. These negative incidents encompassed cases of both ineffective and harmful supervision. Negative themes were grouped according to the following areas: (a) personal difficulties as a minority, (b) bad or harmful supervisors, (c) supervisors’ lack of multicultural competence, and (d) conflicts and discrimination. Most of the themes of hindering incidents can be attributed to supervisors’ lack of competency benchmarks in supervision and cultural diversity as articulated by Fouad et al. (2009), thus highlighting the need for multicultural competence training.
Personal difficulties because of minority status
The theme “Difficulties of being a visible ethnic minority” had the highest participation rate (64%). Most of the difficulties were due to language and cultural barriers. For example, being passive and reserved because of one’s cultural upbringing could create difficulty in interacting with the supervisor in both individual and group supervision. Most of the participants struggled with issues of acculturation. One participant said, “We are passive to start with. We’re not assertive. We’re are [sic] not like Caucasians who speak their mind. Some of our actions may be interpreted as more underlying aggressive.” Another participant said, “What I saw was: here I am, I’m a visible minority. I’ve had to deal with racism. I’ve also migrated and changed country.”
“Difficulties in counseling” (20%) and “Difficulties in group supervision” (20%) referred to personal difficulties as a visible ethnic minority in counseling and group supervision situations, where language and cultural barriers made minority supervisees feel uncomfortable and anxious. In some cases, a supervisor’s assertive, confrontational interpersonal style created some difficulty for ethnic minorities (Daniels et al., 1999).
Bad or harmful supervisors
Negative personal attributes of supervisors contribute to negative incidents as much as positive attributes contribute to positive incidents. The theme “Supervisor was too rigid, controlling, insulting, intimidating or judgmental” was reported by 15 participants (60%). One participant complained, “From the beginning, she just kept criticizing everything I did in counseling. . . . I remember that the whole process was all negative. Everything she said was very negative.”
Harmful supervision occurred when the “Supervisor was unprofessional, unethical and irresponsible” (48%). One of the participants described an incident where the supervisor actually set up a trap in order to build a case against her; this had caused her a great deal of anger and anxiety. Participants reported cases involving supervisors who lied or made supervisees do something unethical, as illustrated by the following incident: “We argued for an hour. She won’t take no, that I am not comfortable doing this. She wasn’t willing to hear that it was not ethical for me to do this; that I didn’t feel comfortable doing it.”
The theme “Feeling worried, unsafe, confused, helpless and stressed out” (56%) reflects the emotional consequence of bad or harmful supervision. Some participants expressed their reactions and feelings as follows: “It meant I’ve withdrawn more and more and got more disillusioned with counseling as a profession.” “I felt very bad. I think that was one of the most negative experiences I have even [sic] gotten from this kind of setting. . . . The thing is he was in the position of power. . . . The thing is he did something very bad. He intentionally tried to put me down, tried to teach me a lesson.” These findings are consistent with prior research on cross-cultural supervision (McNeill et al., 1995).
Lack of cross-cultural competencies
Three themes reflect this problem area: “Supervisor lacked multicultural competencies” (56%), “Stereotyping ethnic minorities” (16%), and “The university or department was not ethnically diverse” (8%). Stereotyping, discrimination, and racism reflect a lack of cross-cultural competencies.
The theme “The university or department was not ethnically diverse” is also related to weakness in cross-cultural competencies. The absence of diversity in terms of graduate students, faculty complement, and curriculum reflects a lack of cross-cultural sensitivity to the needs of minority students and the larger ethnic communities they represent.
Conflicts and discrimination
The theme “Conflicts and politics” (52%) encompasses a variety of conflictual situations resulting from role ambiguity, dual relationship, personality differences, and office politics. Several participants reported negative incidents related to role ambiguity and conflicts, because of the difficulties inherent in multicultural communication.
Another source of conflict is that supervisees often find themselves caught in a political cross-fire in the department or internship site. Their feelings of powerlessness in the conflict situation create a great deal of stress for them. For example, one participant commented, “It was a hard experience. I hated it. I hate being in the middle between my clinical supervisor and the school.”
The theme “Supervisor’s orientation, counseling style and approach different from mine” (28%) represents yet another area of conflict. The possibility of conflict is high in cross-cultural supervision (Vasquez, 1992), because different cultures represent diverse worldviews, values, and belief systems, which affect one’s perceptions and reactions (Sue & Sue, 1990).
Theoretical Considerations
Based on the present findings, the person-centered mentoring model seems to be a promising one, because all of the positive themes of supervision are attributes of mentors. The PMM not only can encompass all the research findings on effective supervision but also can incorporate other models of supervision (Tentoni, 1995). For example, developmental models of supervision are a part of the mentoring model, because mentoring is a developmental process, sensitive to the different stages of protégés’ development (Carmin, 1988).
The PMM also has heuristic value for generating research. It hypothesizes that supervision is effective to the extent that it practices mentorship. Future research will demonstrate more directly and explicitly the linkage between mentoring and multicultural supervision effectiveness and learning (Johnson-Bailey & Cervero, 2002).
The strength of the PMM is that it emphasizes both the psychosocial and professional functions of supervision and both personal attributes and professional competencies of the supervisor. What sets mentoring apart from other models is that the focus is on how supervisees are treated rather than on how they are trained. Other models, especially Ladany’s interpersonal approach (Ancis & Ladany, 2001; Ladany, Friedlander, & Nelson, 2005; Muse-Burke, Ladany, & Deck, 2001), also emphasize the importance of providing a safe and trusting environment and establishing a good working alliance. The PMM differs because its primary focus is on personal encounters and a genuine caring relationship (Wong, 2010) in addition to relational and clinical skills. In sum, mentoring matters for students, supervisors, and the schools (Johnson, 2007). Corey, Haynes, Moulton, and Muratori (2010) testified to the benefits of mentoring: “I recognize the power mentors had in inspiring me to strive for my dreams. Having people who believed in me gave me a sense of hope when discouragement set in” (p. 44).
Contributions and Limitations
The expanded CIT maps out the positive and negative incidents, thus extending prior research (McNeill et al., 1995; Paul & Croteau, 2000). The main theoretical contribution of this article is the person-centered mentoring model. Yes, competence matters, but supervisors who possess the personal qualities of being a mentor are also important, as supported by several of the positive themes of the present study. Future research may want to include the PMM as an additional benchmark for multicultural supervision training because of the importance of being a caring role model to meet the needs of culturally and ethnically different trainees.
The main limitation of the study stems from the self-imposed delimitation of the research. For example, time and financial constraints made it necessary to recruit participants from Vancouver and the Lower Mainland. A related problem is the size of the sample. Another limitation is that the study provided only the perspective of the supervisees. To gain a fuller understanding of cross-cultural supervision, we also need to find out from supervisors what works and does not work with visible minority supervisees.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.