A systematic review of executive coaching outcomes: Is it the journey or the destination that matters the most?

Abstract

In this article, we focus on a specific type of personal and professional development practiceexecutive coaching -and present the most extensive systematic review of executive coaching outcome studies published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals to date. We focus only on coaching provided by external coaches to organizational members. Our purpose is twofold: First, to present and evaluate how executive coaching outcome studies are designed and researched (particularly regarding methodological rigor and context-sensitivity). Secondly, to provide a comprehensive review of what we know about executive coaching outcomes, what are the contextual drivers that affect coaching interventions and what the current gaps in our understanding of coaching practice. On that basis, we discuss and provide a research agenda that might significantly shift the field. We argue that methodological rigor is as important as context-sensitivity in the design of executive coaching outcome studies. We conclude with a discussion of implications for practice.

REsCUE

“…In the recorded data, based on only the posture information, the proposed system detected a wide range of behavioral cues ranging from leaning on a chair to putting a hand on one's hip 1 or placing a hand on the back of one's neck 2 , as shown in Figure 5. Likewise, the gaze information detected not only changes in the looking direction but also self-touch cues [9] such as rubbing one's eyebrow 3 . This is because self-touch cues often interfere with the detection of the eyes and be captured by the anomaly detection algorithm.…”

“…Moreover, the proposed system exploits SmartSifter to obtain the interpretive feedback, fulfilling requirement (3). Given that the GMM is used for clustering of the behavioral data, each component of the obtained GMM can be regarded as a representation of a particular behavioral state of the coachee.…”

“…Also, though the effectiveness of the proposed system is qualitatively supported by the comments from the participated coaches in the user study, a quantitative comparison of the outcome of the coaching sessions with controlled groups is preferred so as to avoid subject biases. However, the impact of executive coaching is shaped by a variety of factors such as its purpose, length, organizational context, and individual differences [34] and evaluating its outcome via randomized controlled experiments is costly [3]. One possible remedy is to expand the preliminary experiment to support the results from the other aspects, e.g., collecting self-labelled groundtruth data of the internal states from coachees to validate whether the change of their internal states is captured using the proposed system.…”

“…Executive coaching plays an important role in human resource development [24,35]. As a result, many companies invest in executive coaching to improve the leadership skills or the performances of their managers and the market share of executive coaching has increased to $2 billion [3,25,29].…”

Developing clarity on the coaching‐counselling conundrum: Implications for counsellors and psychotherapists

“…The research base for coaching has grown exponentially since 2000 (see Figure 3) and there is now a significant amount of coaching-specific research (Athanasopoulou & Dopson, 2018).…”