The Leadership Coaching Sourcebook: A Guide to the Executive Coaching Literature

Nelson, Boyce, Hernaz-Broome, Ely, DiRosa

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781604910872
• eBook ISBN: 9781604917444
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Executive coaching is an increasingly popular means for developing organizational leaders. This sourcebook provides a resource for both practioners and researchers interested in gaining or updating their understanding of the current state of the executive coaching field and to enable them to do so in a systematic manner. By focusing on key research and practice in the executive coaching literature, this sourcebook provides not only a mechanism for consolidating our thinking about leadership coaching issues but also a succinct reference for building future research efforts.

Section 1. Using This Sourcebook

This sourcebook is designed to both provide an introduction to the topic of executive coaching and help guide experienced researchers and practitioners to literature most relevant for their needs. Literature on executive coaching has grown substantially since the annotated bibliography compiled by Douglas and Morley (2000). Due to the growing size and breadth of this literature, rather than simply providing an updated annotated bibliography, this sourcebook strategically compiles key publications as a means to highlight the state of leadership coaching.

This sourcebook can be used in a variety of ways. First, Section 2 provides a brief overview of the past and current state of the executive coaching literature. This material provides a brief synopsis for individuals who have limited or dated knowledge of executive coaching and wish to gain a greater understanding of the major issues in the literature. In addition to this general overview, Section 5 presents a summary of the current literature as well as discussion of the major factors in leadership coaching according to the framework provided in Section 4. We encourage readers to examine Figures 1 and 2 for an overview of the issues and corresponding articles.

For individuals wishing to develop deeper knowledge of a particular topic related to executive coaching, outlines of topic-specific articles are provided in Section 6. Although not intended to replace the original articles, these outlines were designed to help you identify the articles most relevant to your needs. Additionally, each article has been assigned codes to help readers efficiently identify the type of methodology employed, particularly useful introductions of a topic, number of citations included, number of pages, and the type of article (for example, conceptual or empirical). Table 1 provides a list and definitions of the codes, and Table 2 maps each article according to these codes.

Thus, this sourcebook can be read in its entirety to provide a comprehensive overview of current coaching publications, or it can be used to identify resources specific to an individual reader’s needs.

Table 1. Definitions of codes assigned to articles

Code	Definition
Article Type
T1	Conceptual article: includes propositions or arguments based on theory
T2	Research article: tests one or more specific hypotheses
T3	Literature review: review of relevant literature with no propositions or hypothesis testing
T4	Case study: based on a limited number of personal experiences; may include some basic descriptive statistics
T5	Viewpoint: provides a point of view on leadership coaching
Introduction
I	Article includes an extremely thorough, detailed, and well-written introduction to executive coaching
Methodology
M	Article describes a methodologically rigorous study design in enough detail to facilitate replication
Citations
C#	Number of citations referenced in the article
Page Number
P#	Total page length of the article

Table 2. Summary of all articles coded

Section 2. The Past and Current State of Executive Coaching

Executive coaching has witnessed an increase in popularity in both practice and research in the past two decades (Dagley, 2006; Passmore 2007). Although coaching and leader development efforts have been used in organizations for the past half century (Day, 2001; Kampa-Kokesch & Anderson, 2001), the term executive coaching was first coined in the 1980s in order to reduce the punitive stigma associated with coaching. However, practices were still predominantly corrective in nature and aimed at ineffective leaders (Kampa-Kokesch & Anderson, 2001). The practice of executive coaching substantially increased in the early 1990s, as faltering organizations attributed organizational problems to poor leadership. As a result, coaching maintained a punitive connotation (Feldman & Lankau, 2005) for another decade.

Only within the past decade has executive coaching evolved into a developmental opportunity and come to be perceived in a positive light for leaders (Feldman & Lankau, 2005). Today, coaches work closely with executives on long-term goals, daily activities, and interpersonal skills (Dean & Meyer, 2002; Hernez-Broome & Hughes, 2004; Jay, 2003). The success and subsequent demand for executive coaching has created an enormous growth in the number of professional coaches and coaching programs in organizations (Day, 2001; Dean & Meyer, 2002; Feldman & Lankau, 2005; Hernez-Broome & Hughes, 2004).

Despite the advent of executive coaching practices, the literature provides little consensus on a definition of executive coaching. However, the field appears to be reaching a convergence regarding the core components, as evidenced by several articles agr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Overview
• Section 1. Using this Sourcebook
• Section 2. The Past and Current State of Executive Coaching
• Section 3. Introduction of the Leadership Coaching Framework
• Section 4. Article Selection Criteria
• Section 5. Emerging Article Themes
• Conclusion
• Section 6. Article Outlines
• Section 7. Additional Resources