The Global Business of Coaching

A Meta-Analytical Perspective

David Lines, Christina Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429884917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching

Coaching has become a global business phenomenon, yet the way that coaching has evolved and spread across the globe is not unproblematic. Some of these challenges include: different types/genres of coaching; understanding and relevance of different coaching philosophies and models in different cultural contexts; equivalency of qualifications and coach credentials, as well as questions over standards and governance, as part of a wider debate around professionalization. Coaching then, as with the transfer of knowledge and professionalization in other disciplines, is not immune to ethnocentricity.

Through a combination of adopting a meta-analysis of coaching, supported with narratives of coaching practice drawn from different socio-political/cultural contexts, the aim of this book is to challenge current knowledge, understanding and norms of how coaching is, or should, be practised in different cultural contexts. This book will provide a foundation for further research in coaching as an academic field of study and as an emerging profession. It will resonate with critical scholars, coach educators, and coach practitioners who want to develop their praxis and enhance their reflexivity and be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of business and leadership, human resource development, organizational learning and development, mentoring and coaching.

Part I
A Meta-Analysis of Coaching

Roots, Theories, and Models Examined Through a Critical Lens

1 Introduction, Rationale, and Overview

Coaching has become a global business phenomenon. Yet as others and we observe, the way that coaching has evolved and spread across the globe is not unproblematic. Some of these challenges/tensions include: different types/genres of coaching; understanding and relevance of different coaching philosophies and models in different cultural contexts; equivalency of qualifications and coach credentials, as well as questions over standards and governance, as part of a wider debate around professionalisation. Coaching, then, as with the transfer of knowledge and professionalisation in other disciplines, is not immune to ethnocentricity (McLean 2017; Prasad 2016).

In discussing some of these challenges/tensions with academics (who either teach on coaching programmes or conduct research on coaching) coach practitioners, and others who have been in the field of HR and coaching as professional practitioners and are working in different contexts; we have identified a gap for a book that adopts a more critical perspective on coaching.

Within the broad discipline of Human Resource Development (HRD), there has been a growing interest in adopting a more critical perspective (Sambrook 2014; Stewart, Rigg and Trehan 2007). An approach that reflects some form of transition from one state to another, such as the transition from a taken-for-granted acceptance of a phenomenon to a more critical approach ‘evidenced by a “critical mass” of researchers and practitioners’ (Sambrook 2014: 1) and that critically engages with the socio-political debates and processes that shape (or have shaped) a particular phenomenon, or HRD developmental approach (Elliott and Reynolds 2014).

Our aim in writing this book was to produce something that resonates with critical scholars, coach educators, as well as coach practitioners who want to develop their praxis and enhance their reflexivity. In addition, we provide a foundation for further research in coaching as an academic field of study and as an emerging profession.

To stimulate a critical debate within the field of coaching, in this book we will address questions such as:

• What is coaching and how do coaching interventions differ from other developmental approaches? Is coaching simply old wine in new bottles?
• What are the different genres of coaching? When, how and why did these different genres emerge?
• How does coaching differ in a variety of cultural environments and how has it morphed from its original purpose of ‘life coaching’?
• Is coaching a profession, or an industry? If considered a profession, what stage is coaching in terms of developing as a profession?
• Who is leading the movement towards coach credentialing and professionalisation? How do the different social actors engaged in this activity legitimise their authority to do so?
• What tensions, if any, are there between coaching evolving as a profession and the economic imperative of coaching practitioners needing to earn sufficient income from coaching to survive?

The topics that we surface and debate in this book resonate with the themes of the 2017 UFHRD Annual Conference. These include: challenging issues of ethnocentricity and colonisation of HRD and executive development, as well as surfacing tensions associated with standard-setting and standardisation within the field of HRD more generally (Anderson 2017). Through a combination of adopting a meta-analysis of coaching, supported with narratives of coaching practice drawn from different socio-political/cultural contexts, our aim is to challenge current knowledge, understanding and norms of how coaching is, or should, be practised in different cultural contexts.

In this chapter we set out our rationale for developing a meta-analysis of coaching and what we believe we can contribute to the field of coaching. We also set out our methodological approach to researching and writing this book and explain why we are adopting a grounded theory approach and a historiographical perspective of the history of coaching, and how these methodologies informed, supported, and substantiated our analysis. The chapter will conclude with an overview of the forthcoming chapters in the book.

Rationale for Adopting Grounded Theory as a Research Methodology and the Use of Historiography as an Analytical Approach to the Emergence of Coaching

The effect of the Western world (McLean 2017) on the development of coaching models and methods has created a highly focused ethnocentricity towards a Westernisation of coaching as it has been dispersed around the world, mainly through the efforts of I.C.F. as a means of dissemination. This has generated a plethora of articles, books, and training methods that mirror a Westernised approach to coaching and often contains assumptions about the manner in which coaches approach their clients. We noticed that both coaches their client’s voices, in Asia, were missing from the coaching narratives and their opinions and perspectives do not seem to be represented in the literature. One of the purposes of this research, and critical analysis, is to provide a link between the mainly western literature and the Asian voices that we consider to be missing from the coaching discourses. (Lines 2004: 61)

The authors noticed in their preliminary reading for this book that the literature that purports to describe the historical emergence of coaching has been mainly descriptive and assumptive about how coaching arrived in the commercial and business worlds and how it became a global phenomenon. We wanted to adopt a critical inquiry of the history of coaching and put these assumptions into their particular historical context. Historiographical inquiry and the methods of analysis has provided us with an exemplar of how we could undertake this part of our research.

The Way We Approached This Book—Methodologies and Methods of Inquiry

We adopted a meta-analytical approach to the field of coaching in a global world. Our aim is to take a critical perspective on the implications for coaching of the various phenomenon that have and are influencing the growth of coaching, such) and as an instrument to enhance performance and organisational transformation and change. (Hamlin, Ellinger and Beattie 2008). Meta-analysis has a distinct definition in both quantitative and qualitative research approaches. According to Paterson et al. (2001: 1), a key aspect of meta-analysis is the generation of ‘new ways of thinking about phenomenon.’ In this book we aim to adopt a different approach from the established approach to meta-analysis that presents a detailed analysis of all of the research findings within a specific field. We suggest that before such a study can be undertaken the main phenomenon within the field will need to be identified so that more research analysis can be undertaken to focus on each of the phenomenon within the field. Accordingly we will use a meta-analysis proposed by Patton (1990: 406–407) to identify the patterns of coaching as a global phenomenon and discuss how these patterns, forms, and shapes may direct, or not, the future of coaching. This approach is related to the use of grounded theory as an approach to understanding the field as is rather than the field as we consider it to be (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Locke 2001; Strauss and Corbin 1990). We believe this approach will enable us to present a more critical perspective of how different forms of coaching, genres/philosophies of coaching, and the main phenomenon in the field have emerged and are positioned, and the implications of this for the evolution of coaching.

According to Glaser and Strauss (1967: 21ff), the underlying purpose of using grounded theory, as a research methodology is to generate a substantive theory, the theory is considered to be ‘work in progress’ or ‘emergent’ in nature (Dick 2000: 3) and, as such, can be used as a foundation for further research in the chosen field (Glaser and Strauss 1967). This is a different approach to the ‘scientific’ approach, as Robson (1993: 18) points out, ‘the scientific approach is usually regarded as starting with theory.’ It is important to point out that it is not the purpose of grounded theory to test or verify theories, rather it is used to assemble evidence, collected in terms of … preferably personal interviews and or surveys, to uncover ideas and fresh hypotheses from the research subjects and field (Glaser and Strauss 1967: 28–31; Gummesson 1991: 83).

The grounded theory approach is a qualitative research method that uses a systematic set of procedures to develop an inductively derived grounded theory about a phenomenon.

(Strauss and Corbin 1990: 24)

The main idea underpinning grounded theory is the constant comparative method by which the theory is developed. We interviewed some of our participants, and emailed questions to a wider range of participants, whom we were in touch with across Asia and the UK, we then analysed, compared the information, and surfaced the themes, which we then used to structure the narrative parts of the book. Glaser and Strauss (1967) and Strauss and Corbin (1990) were committed to the formation of hypotheses that reflected the field rather than taking existing theories and then looking for examples in the field to support the theory. As Lincoln & Guba state: ‘Grounded theory … is theory that follows from data rather than preceding them (as in conventional inquiry)’(1985: 204).

Therefore, to bring an established theoretical framework from the discipline of social psychology to grounded theory research may bias the authors and prevent us from noticing what was happening in the interviews and setting in which we were researching. For example, to assume, at the beginning of the study, that the processes of the global business of coaching are the same as a typical business process may have closed the author’s minds to the other possibilities that existed within the field. However, as Glaser and Strauss (1967), and Strauss and Corbin (1990), identify, it is useful during the research process to use the existing literature as another data source to compare and contrast the categories that were emerging from the data. This was then used to develop and enhance the line of research, with the proviso that the field data gathering process is the directional driver within the inquiry and that the literature remained as a supporter and challenger to the study. We therefore gathered information from the various groups of participants and analysed these to provide the themes that we have used as a soft structure for the chapters and then using the literature we have presented a critical review and then in separate sections we have included the participants’ narratives and presented them as provisional narratives that require further research and inquiry.

The theory generated during grounded theory research offers perspectives and ideas for understanding the underlying problems or issues in a particular field of research or general problem area. (Glaser and Strauss 1967) It is important to note that a substantial theory is not generalizable outside of the context in which it has been generated and as a result will require more research to generate a fully grounded theory. We have surfaced themes that can now be taken further, and may be used to develop a grounded theory of coaching, that can aid practitioners and decisions makers to design and develop effective coaching processes. We have suggested some questions at the end of each chapter that can be used to continue research in the coaching field.

In addition, another reason for adopting a grounded theory approach focused on access to the coaching literature. The literature appears to be spread across multiple journals, e.g., psychology, social sciences, leadership development, and organisational development. Access to these journals is often dependent on the following factors’ membership of a university library; journal access is often restricted via a subscription or paywall.

Historiography

We have chosen to take a historiographical approach to the history of coaching as a way of illustrating the, often, tenuous links between the different forms of intervention and the emergence of coaching. The context in which coaching has grown up into an alternative approach to personal and professional development has been included so that we can begin to understand that over time human intervention in areas of development has altered according the requirements of the social and political agendas that were in vogue.

The use of historiography as a methodology provides us with a multifaceted lens that we can bring to analysing the past that has contributed to the various histories of coaching. An essential element of this analytical process is to understand the history as it is written and ask further questions about other factors that might have been influential and therefore may contribute to the environment that was necessary for change to occur. This section will widen the lens through which we perceive coaching, to include the socio-political and cultural aspects, and the similarities and differences in the various accounts. We will surface issues of power and the relationship of conflict between the originators of different schools of thought, and we will illustrate how disagreements between the established way of operating and fresh thinking has shaped and created the milieu in which coaching manifests itself in the current timeframe. We also want to pay particular attention to what might have been missed in the somewhat positive transmission of the coaching stories and try to imagine which voices or representations have been left out of the current narratives.

Why Study the History of Coaching?—Rationale and Context of Historiographical Inquiry

History has been defined as being a ‘continuous, typically chronological, record of important or pubic events or of a particular trend or institution’ (The New Oxford Dictionary of English 1998: 869). However, as Tosh (2015: 131) points out; ‘The word history carries two meanings in common parlance. It refers both to what actually happened in the past and to the representation of that past in the work of historians.’ Arnold (2000: 5) uses the word ‘ “historiography” to mean the process of writing history and “history” to mean the end product of that process.’

Historians inevitably decide which things can or should be said. So ‘history’ (the true stories historian...