Executive Coaching Explored: Toward a Contingency Approach

Abstract

The domain of executive coaching is becoming a crowded one. Despite its meteoric rise and use since the advent of the millennium, academic inquiry seems to lag the progress made in applied and practitioner circles. Even more, academic inquiry remains largely absent in the critique and investigation of commonly used practitioner models. In fact, the dominant logic surrounding the delivery and execution of executive coaching seems to affirm a thoughtful, mutual enterprise that unfolds over time and where trust is necessary. Put simply, the assumptions that underlie and underpin the thinking and execution of executive coaching rests heavily on the consultative, free form type of delivery and interaction. In this conceptual paper, we begin to challenge the veracity of this orthodoxy. In so doing, we plant the seeds of a contingency-based approach to executive coaching. In particular, we advance five contextual considerations that may argue for more of a directive, as opposed to consultative, approach towards the executive coaching experience.