Advisor Multicultural Orientation and the Advisory Alliance: An Extension of the Multicultural Orientation Framework to the Advisory Relationship

Scholars have underscored the importance of academic advisors to attend to culture for graduate student success and development, yet research examining cultural processes within the advisory relationship is limited. In contrast, the Multicultural Orientation (MCO) framework has been increasingly applied to examine and further understand cultural processes as they unfold in therapeutic relationships and clinical supervisory relationships. Given existing literature on the importance of addressing culture within the advisory relationship and the positive influence of therapist and supervisor MCO on various client and trainee outcomes, this study extends the MCO framework to examine the effect of advisor MCO on the advisory alliance. Data for this study consisted of 343 doctoral advisees and 187 advisors across 45 APA-accredited Counseling Psychology (CP) programs in the United States. Multilevel modeling was used to examine the effect of partitioned variance components of advisees’ perceptions of their advisor MCO: within-advisor MCO, between-advisor MCO, and between-faculty MCO, as well as the interaction between these components on the advisory alliance. Results indicated significant and positive MCO-alliance effects within-advisor, between-advisor, and between-faculty for cultural humility and cultural comfort. More specifically, advisees who perceived their advisor to be more culturally humble and culturally comfortable compared to the perceptions of other advisees of the same advisor, rated the advisory alliance higher. Similarly, advisors that were perceived higher in cultural humility and cultural comfort compared to other advisors were rated higher on the advisory alliance (between-advisor). Lastly, advisees’ perceptions of their faculty’s cultural humility and cultural comfort (i.e., aggregated advisee perceptions of the advisors within a CP program faculty) were positively associated with the advisory alliance, meaning that advisees who perceived their faculty-as-a-whole to be higher in cultural humility and cultural comfort compared to other groups of faculty, rated their advisory alliance higher. Regarding cultural opportunities, when advisees rated their advisor higher on cultural opportunities compared to the other advisors, they perceived the advisory alliance to be higher. These preliminary findings lay the foundation for future directions in training practices and research on the importance of cultural processes within the advisory relationship.