Approaches to Research on Executive and Organizational Coaching

D Stober International Journal of Coaching in Organizations 2005

As coaching’s popularity has risen as a tool in executive and organizational development, questions of effectiveness and potential outcomes arise. Through research investigating coaching effectiveness and outcomes, different studies have fulfilled different research approaches of exploration, description, and explanation. This article discusses a range of coaching outcome research in terms of these approaches and concludes that many exploratory issues have been illuminated, a number of outcomes associated with coaching have been described, and there are a few studies that are moving in the direction of explaining what underlying causes give rise to positive outcomes in coaching. There are a number of challenges to designing and implementing rigorous methods that can definitively answer questions of effectiveness and outcomes due to coaching. Research on coaching outcomes is relatively new and while there are the beginnings of evidence for coaching effectiveness, much still needs to be done.