Employee feedback orientation: implications for effective coaching relationships

Abstract

In their seminal paper on performance management, London and Smither suggested that an individual's feedback orientation should influence his or her receptivity to coaching. In the current paper, we seek to provide support for this notion by showing that individuals’ feedback orientations predict their perceptions of the coaching relationships that they share with their supervisors. We also examine the commonly held notion that the relationship is a critical prerequisite for effective coaching. Whereas previous research has examined the influence of supervisor (or coach) individual differences on coaching relationships, results of the current study demonstrate that individual differences of the employee (or coachee) also impact the quality of the coaching relationship. We examine our theory, that employee feedback orientation impacts the quality of the employee/supervisor coaching relationships, using survey data from 479 employees of a Fortune 500 company. Regression analyses show that employee feedback orientation accounts for significant variance in the quality of a coaching relationship. In addition, the current study provides some of the first empirical evidence of the link between the coaching relationship and actual coaching behaviours. The results of regression analyses also demonstrate that perceptions of the coaching relationship accounted for significant variance in reports of actual manager coaching behaviour.