Doing Well with Executive Coaching: Psychological and Behavioral Impacts

Executive coaching is a popular intervention in organizations. Large amounts of money are spent on programs designed to have positive personal and professional outcomes, but there is as yet little systematic empirical evidence to support its effects. The current study addresses this gap by exploring the effects of executive coaching on leaders psychological states and transformational leadership behavior. Participants were taking part in a year long leadership training program, of which executive coaching was one component. To delineate the effects of executive coaching from the other training interventions, participants were randomly assigned to training and control groups. Measures of self-efficacy, developmental support, positive affect, openness to new behaviors, developmental planning, and transformational leadership were collected after the training group completed executive coaching to enable us to compare the impact of executive coaching on these measures. The data supported our hypotheses - leaders who had completed executive coaching reported higher self-efficacy, developmental support, openness to new behaviors, and developmental planning than leaders who had not completed coaching. In addition, team members gave higher ratings of transformational leadership behavior to leaders who had completed executive coaching than to leaders who had not completed executive coaching.