This conference paper offers a critical examination of the construct of research supervisor agency to foster doctoral researcher persistence and completion in practitioner doctoral programs, especially for the Doctor of Business Administration and Doctor of Education, within a distributed student support environment. The current literature of higher education engagement specific to supervision of practitioner doctoral research is appraised and models to foster effective practitioner research supervision are presented. New insights are presented for research supervisor engagement within online environments for practitioner doctoral programs. The authors also provide comparisons of the nomenclature of the competencies needed for effective online doctoral research supervision within an online doctoral community.