Supervisor Cultural Humility and Supervisee Nondisclosure: The Supervisory Working Alliance Matters

Abstract

Given that at least half of supervisees (therapist trainees) never have their clinical work monitored or observed, supervisees who withhold salient information in clinical supervision compromise supervisors’ ability to monitor client welfare and promote supervisees’ professional development. Attempting to further understand the factors explaining supervisee nondisclosure, we tested the supervisory working alliance as a mediator of the hypothesized inverse relations of cultural humility and collaborative supervision with supervisee nondisclosure (supervision-related and clinically-related nondisclosure) among a diverse sample of 214 supervisees in applied psychology and allied mental health programs. Results supported the hypotheses that (a) descriptively, supervision-related nondisclosure was more prominent than clinically-related nondisclosure; (b) cultural humility substantially inversely predicted supervisee nondisclosure; and (c) the supervisory working alliance fully mediated the inverse relations of cultural humility and collaborative supervision with supervisee nondisclosure. Understanding the mechanisms underlying supervisee nondisclosure has broad implications for clinicians and researchers alike.