Does Coaching Work or Are We Asking the Wrong Question?

By A. Fillery-Travis, Dave Lane. Coaching Researched, 2006

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Within the context of an expanding market for coaching in all its forms organisations are asking the questions ‘Does coaching work?’ They seek evidence of a return on investment. We argue within this paper that this is the wrong question. Before we can ask whether coaching works we must ask how is it being used, is a coherent framework of practice and finally is it perceived or quantified as being effective within that framework?We review the practitioner and academic literature as well as our own research to address each of these questions in turn. We posit a framework of practice based upon the coaching agenda identify by coachee and coach within the contracting phase of the engagement. This encompasses the coaching mode and role as well as the supervisory relationships which exist. The research literature is then considered in the context of the framework.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b507df8ba3a416bcbcb5b629867733106f4ea4dc

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In Applied Psychology

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Building successful leadership coaching relationships: Examining impact of matching criteria in a leadership coaching program (2010, unknown): “Leadership coaching is an integral component of most organizations’ leadership development strategy 1 (Fillery-Travis & Lane, 2006;Underhill, McAnally, & Koriath, 2007).”
Evidence-based coaching: Flourishing or languishing? (2007, background): “Although there are a number of commentaries rightly drawing attention to the deficits in much of the existing coaching research (Fillery-Travis & Lane, 2006; Passmore & Gibbes, 2007), it would appear that the coaching research is moving through the ‘‘natural’’ stages of research development, from…”
The State of Play in Coaching Today: A Comprehensive Review of the Field (2010, methodology): “Goal attainment scaling (GAS) techniques offer a useful methodologies for measuring goal progression towards predetermined objective success benchmarks (see Fillery-Travis & Lane, 2006), and the broader use of GAS could provide a means of making comparisons between studies.”
The power of coaching: a meta-analytic investigation (2015, background): “Fillery-Travis and Lane (2006) suggested that it is of paramount importance to address these questions and determinewhichmechanisms can foster effective coaching outcomes.”
Challenges for the Theory and Practice of Business Coaching (2016, unknown): “In 2003 Capuzzi Simon claimed that there were tens of thousands of business coaches in the USA and three years later Fillery-Travis and Lane (2006) described business coaching as a $2 billion per annum market.”
Exploring key aspects in the formation of coaching relationships: initial indicators from the perspective of the coachee and the coach (2010, unknown): “More recently, there has been increasing interest in coaching processes and more systematic approaches to evidence-based coaching research have been suggested (Bachkirova, 2007 ; Fillery-Travis & Lane, 2006 ; Kauffman & Bachkirova, 2009 ).”
Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context (2014, unknown): “Thus, we agree with Fillery-Travis and Lane (2006) that it is the time to shift attention from the question ‘ does it work?”
A critical review of executive coaching research: a decade of progress and what's to come (2011, background): “…the issue and the need for a coherent organisational approach from initial design, intervention through to outputs has been previously identified (Fillery-Travis & Lane, 2006), but how can organisations build cultures which support coaching as a management style as well as a development…”
Autonomy support, relationship satisfaction and goal focus in the coach–coachee relationship: which best predicts coaching success? (2014, background): “…we now had reasonable grounds to believe that coaching was effective, research should work to identify the so-called ‘active ingredients’ of coaching and as well delineating the factors involved in successful coach–coachee relationships (Fillery-Travis & Lane, 2006; Joo, 2005; Kampa & White, 2002).”