Professional development relationships for counselor educators: The relationship between ethnic identity, advocacy, empowerment, and cultural empathy on faculty mentoring alliance

Mentoring programs are viewed as effective recruiting and retention tools that orient faculty members into the professoriate and provide opportunities to integrate cultural diversity into university ideology. However, empirical research about faculty mentoring is sparse, and disparate findings exist regarding the benefits and barriers of cross-cultural and homogenous mentoring relationships. This study describes mentoring relationships among a national sample of 226 counselor education faculty. Multiple regression and multivariate analysis of variance were employed to examine the relationships between working alliance and ethnic identity, advocacy, empowerment, and cultural empathy among cross-cultural and homogenous mentoring relationships. Strong positive relationships were found between the predictor variables of advocacy, empowerment, and cultural empathy and the outcome variable of working alliance, accounting for over half of the variance. Ethnic identity predicted the working alliance accounting for an additional 1% of variance. Significant differences were found between cross-cultural and homogenous mentor types. Ethnic identity was significantly higher among cross-cultural mentor relationships than for homogenous mentor relationships; however, the variance accounted for was slight. This paper describes the background for the study, methodology, and results. Implications are discussed along with future research directions.