Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent bank manager's coaching, a managerial relationship behavior based on mutual trust, openness and quality of exchanges, affects front-line employee's performance through the mediating effect of salesperson's customer orientation. Design/methodology/approach – The paper conducted a non-experimental, cross-sectional study; a Canadian bank agreed to participate in the study and 122 financial advisors with sales responsibilities answered a web-based survey; data were analyzed using structural equation modelling. Findings – The paper found support for the hypotheses that managerial coaching behavior can help bank employees develop their customer orientation and increase their performance, as well as reduce opportunistic behavior (sales orientation). The paper found that the direct link between coaching and performance, plus the mediating effect of sales orientation and customer orientation (SOCO) can potentially explain a significant variation in employee's performance (r2=0.23). The paper also found that the hypothesized model provided better explanations of the phenomenon when compared with two rival models, one considering SOCO as a full mediator between coaching and performance, and the other one considering only the effect of coaching on performance. Originality/value – In the banking sector, practitioners and scholars are paying increased attention to the role of trust and relationship behaviors in the development of market orientation and customer relationships. The paper identified a key relationship behavior (customer orientation) and tests its impact as a mediator between a relationship managerial behavior (coaching) and business outcomes (performance) in an international banking setting (Canada).

The present business environment of extreme competition and rapid changes has motivated scholars to identify variables that can help companies stand up to and overcome these challenges. Research on self-regulation found that self-perceptions of efficacy not only can mediate the effects of external influences on results, but can also regulate employees' initiation, persistence and choice of purposeful actions. Within the selfregulatory framework, this paper specifically explores the role of managerial coaching as an antecedent of employee self-efficacy and performance. Using a sample of 122 Financial Advisors, we found that managerial coaching can increase employee self-efficacy, which in turn fully mediates the effects of coaching on results and behavioural performance. We suggest that, if generalized use of coaching by managers can increase employees' selfefficacy (which is instrumental in increasing employees' initiation and persistence of coping behavior when faced with challenges and problematic situations), then the use of managerial coaching by an organization might promote employee self-regulation, increase the organization's general resilience and, thus, can be considered a sustainable competitive advantage. Practice points• This study is particularly relevant to the practice of managerial coaching and its application in organizations. The main contribution is that managerial coaching can increase employee's self-efficacy, behavioural performance and results performance.• Previous research in self-regulatory behaviour found that people with high self-efficacy set higher and more difficult goals, are more committed to them, initiate actions to cope with problematic situations, spend more effort, persist longer in goal pursuit and make better choices of activities and settings.• Accordingly, the systematic use of managerial coaching by an organization can increase the self-regulatory behavior of all its employees through its direct effect on self-efficacy, thus increasing their collective effort, their resilience when faced with challenging circumstances and their flexibility to deal with those circumstances and implement new solutions. As such, managerial coaching can be considered a dynamic competitive advantage of the organization.

Coaching has been identified as a key managerial behavior that organizations must promote to develop employees and achieve higher levels of performance. Despite this agreement and an increasing interest in coaching, there is still a paucity of studies exploring the impact of coaching on individual performance. This article presents an empirical investigation from two international field studies, one using business‐to‐business salespersons working in Latin America and the other one using business‐to‐consumer frontline employees from a service organization in Canada. Building on leader‐member exchange theory, we propose that coaching increases individual performance beyond the potential impact of sales experience and tenure. We find that coaching can explain between 2.9% and 6.2% of the variance in performance when controlling for tenure and experience. This article makes several scientific and managerial contributions, and also opens new avenues for research.

Purpose The impact of managerial coaching on frontline employee performance has received initial support in literature in recent years. However, no studies have explored if this impact should vary according to the career stage that the employee is in. If an interaction effect exists, then managers should expect different results when coaching people in different stages of their careers. Otherwise, all employees (independently of their career stage) can benefit from the positive impact of coaching and, thus, the manager can expect a continuous positive outcome on employee performance throughout their careers. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the moderation effect of an employee’s career stage on the relationship between managerial coaching and performance. Design/methodology/approach A sample of 318 financial advisors from two Canadian banks was used to collect data on the amount, and quality, of managerial coaching received by the employees, as well as their performance. multigroup confirmatory factor analysis ran in AMOS was used to test the moderation effect of experience. Findings Results confirmed the positive effect of managerial coaching on frontline employee behavioral and sales performance, but no moderation effect was found. The measuring and causal models showed invariance for employees in their early (one to seven years of selling experience), middle (8-15 years), and late (more than 15 years) career stages, suggesting that managerial coaching will make a consistent contribution to performance throughout all the stages of the employee’s career. Research limitations/implications The study makes two main contributions to the scientific literature. First, it offers an original study examining the effect of managerial coaching on frontline employee performance in the banking sector. Second, it examines the role of selling experience as a moderator in coaching processes, thus contributing to the limited literature on career stages. Practical implications The study suggests that managers should equally devote their coaching efforts to all employees, independently of their selling experience. Contrary to the belief that rookies will benefit more from coaching, and that “you cannot teach an old dog new tricks,” results suggest that managerial coaching makes a continuous contribution to performance throughout all the stages of an employee’s career. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the moderation effect of selling experience on coaching consequences, and one of the few to present evidence of the positive effect of managerial coaching on frontline employee performance in the banking sector.

This paper investigates the detailed dynamical properties of a relatively homogeneous sample of disc‐dominated S0 galaxies, with a view to understanding their formation, evolution and structure. By using high signal‐to‐noise ratio long‐slit spectra of edge‐on systems, we have been able to reconstruct the complete line‐of‐sight velocity distributions of stars along the major axes of the galaxies. From these data, we have derived both model distribution functions (the phase density of their stars) and the approximate form of their gravitational potentials. The derived distribution functions are all consistent with these galaxies being simple disc systems, with no evidence for a complex formation history. Essentially no correlation is found between the characteristic mass scalelengths and the photometric scalelengths in these galaxies, suggesting that they are dark‐matter dominated even in their inner parts. Similarly, no correlation is found between the mass scalelengths and asymptotic rotation speed, implying a wide range of dark matter halo properties. By comparing their asymptotic rotation speeds with their absolute magnitudes, we find that these S0 galaxies are systematically offset from the Tully–Fisher relation for later‐type galaxies. The offset in luminosity is what one would expect if star formation had been suddenly switched off a few Gyr ago, consistent with a simple picture in which these S0s were created from ordinary later‐type spirals which were stripped of their star‐forming interstellar medium when they encountered a dense cluster environment.