Coaching of International Managers: Organizational and Individual Perspectives

R Salomaa 2017

Although executive coaching is widely used, international coaching studies are scarce. The aim of this dissertation, which consists of three articles, is to increase understanding of international, executive coaching by studying the research questions: 1) How and why is coaching utilized in Global Talent Management programs in multinational organizations? 2) Which factors are identified to be critical to expatriate coaching success? 3) How does coaching support the development of the career capital (capabilities of knowing-how, knowing-why, knowing-whom) of expatriates? The data of this dissertation consists of semi-structured interviews and published and unpublished written materials. The data was gathered from three stakeholder groups: coached international managers and expatriates; internationally working coaches; and HR professionals responsible for international coaching programs. Three different qualitative approaches (multiple case study and thematic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and narrative analysis) were applied in the analysis. Further, the Coaching Continuum Stage Model, Integral Coaching Model and Career Capital Model were adopted as analyzing and categorization tools, as it never had been done before in the coaching literature. The findings show that executive coaching was utilized as a part of Global Talent Management programs as a leadership development tool, aiming to transform the leadership culture toward coaching-based managerial practice, but coaching was not driven purely by talent management strategy in the studied multinational companies. The study contributes to coaching literature by developing the Coaching Continuum Stage model further and by identifying different characteristics of the stages of the continuum. In addition, the study shows that there are various factors impacting the success of expatriate coaching and that these factors interact with each other. Further, this study supports empirically the argument that international, executive coaching is a well-working developmental tool in an international context due to its adjustable nature. More-over, the findings confirm empirically the argument that international executive coaching supports the development of career capital for expatriates. International, executive coaching can be recommended as a Human Resource Development tool for multinational organizations.