I'm giving a lecture about this next week, and thought I should try to get this clear in my own mind first, so I've done a bit of a trawl through the recent literature about the topic to see what we know.
First of all, it was interesting to note that coaching is definitely on the increase. The industry is growing, the number of clients who are being coached is on the up, and the fees that coaches are charging seems to be increasing too. But the evidence base for whether or not, and how coaching works, is lagging behind a bit.
The effectiveness of coaching is a hard thing to measure. It's hard to work out what you should be measuring - whether that is the degree to which an individual has met their own goals, behavioural change, increased productivity, or work engagement. Perhaps we should be going beyond the individual to examine the impact on the organisation - asking a coachee's team whether they are feeling any effects of their manager's coaching, or looking at the organisation's overall profitability. Then even if you are clear about what you are looking to measure, it is not always easy to be sure that it's the coaching which has made the difference. Performance, attitude and productivity are influenced by all sorts of different factors, so it's hard to feel confident that coaching has made the difference. Finally, the nature of coaching will vary tremendously. Coaches vary in their style and their competence, they drawn on different theoretical models, and they are likely to get on better with some clients than others. Then there is the challenge, associated with much academic publishing, that studies which find a positive outcome are far more likely to get published than those which don't, so even if we can see positive effects of coaching reported in the literature, that may not be the whole story.
But despite these challenges, there has been some decent research which explores the issues.
A number of small scale studies have found positive links between coaching and goal accomplishment (Fischer & Beimer, 2009), professional growth (McGriffin & Obonya, 2010), professional relationships (Kombarakaran et al., 2005), managerial flexibility (Jones, Rafferty & Griffin, 2006), productivity (Olivero, Bane & Kopelma, 1997) and resilience and workplace well-being (Grant et al., 2010).
On the back of these kinds of small scale studies, two larger meta-analyses have been conducted.
Theeboom, Beerma and van Vianen (2014) looked at all different kinds of coaching (executive, life and health) and examined specifically the impact on the individual. They found that coaching overall had a significant positive impact on clients, and specifically helped with skill development, well-being, their ability to cope and attitudes to work. They found no link between outcomes and number of sessions, although offered the plausible explanation that people facing more complex challenges were more likely to end up having longer coaching relationships.
Jones, Woods and Guillaume (2016) conducted another meta-analysis of studies which had been conducted into executive, or workplace training and found some encouraging findings. They found that coaching has a positive impact overall on organisation outcomes, and at the individual level, people benefited from coaching in terms of their skill development, their attitude towards work and they achieved better results. They also found that internal coaches (not line managers) were a little more effective than external ones, but there was no discernible difference between face to face and blended (ie face to face plus online) coaching and that (echoing Theeboom et al.'s findings) the number of coaching sessions didn't seem to matter either.
Drilling down to examine how exactly coaching works, the spotlight definitely seems to come to rest on the working alliance - or the relationship between the coach and the coachee. This echoes what decades of research into psychotherapy have found, which is that the specific approach the practitioner chooses to take doesn't seem to matter much; what matters instead is what they call the common factors which basically seems to boil down to a positive relationship, trust, an unconditional positive regard. One of the biggest studies which explores this in coaching, was conducted by de Haan and his colleagues in 2016, and explored the links between perceptions of the coaching relationship and coaching effectiveness. The authors looked at nearly 2000 client-coach pairs, and found that the client's perception of the relationship was closely linked to their perception of coaching effectiveness, particularly so when the working alliance was focused on goals and tasks. They also identified that a good working alliance enhanced the client's self-efficacy, and this increased confidence led to more effective outcomes.
References
de Haan, E., Grant, A. M., Burger, Y., & Eriksson, P. O. (2016). A large-scale study of executive and workplace coaching: The relative contributions of relationship, personality match, and self-efficacy. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 68(3), 189.
De Meuse, K. P., Dai, G., & Lee, R. J. (2009). Evaluating the effectiveness of executive coaching: Beyond ROI?. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 2(2), 117-134.
Fischer, R. L., & Beimers, D. (2009). “Put me in, Coach”: A pilot evaluation of executive coaching in the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 19(4), 507-522.
Grover, S., & Furnham, A. (2016). Coaching as a developmental intervention in organisations: A systematic review of its effectiveness and the mechanisms underlying it. PloS one, 11(7), e0159137.
Kombarakaran, F. A., Yang, J. A., Baker, M. N., & Fernandes, P. B. (2008). Executive coaching: it works!. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 60(1), 78.
Jones, R. A., Rafferty, A. E., & Griffin, M. A. (2006). The executive coaching trend: Towards more flexible executives. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 27(7), 584-596.
Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. (2016). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta‐analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 249-277.
Olivero, G., Bane, K. D., & Kopelman, R. E. (1997). Executive coaching as a transfer of training tool: Effects on productivity in a public agency. Public personnel management, 26(4), 461-469.
Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1-18.
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