Abstract
Coaching outcome research convincingly argues that coaching is effective and facilitates change in clients. While coaching practice literature depicts questions as key vehicle for such change, empirical findings as regards the local and global change potential of questions are so far largely missing in both (psychological) outcome research and (linguistic and psychological) process research on coaching. The local change potential of questions refers to a turn-by-turn transformation as a result of their sequentiality, the global change potential is related to the power of questions to initiate, process and finalize established phases of change. This programmatic article on questions, or rather questioning sequences, in executive coaching pursues two goals: firstly, it takes stock of available insights into questions in coaching and advocates for Conversation Analysis as a fruitful methodological framework to assess the local change potential of questioning sequences. Secondly, it points to the limitations of a local turn-by-turn approach to unravel the overall change potential of questions and calls for an interdisciplinary approach to bring both local and global effectiveness into relation. Such an approach is premised on conversational sequentiality and psychological theories of change and facilitates research on questioning sequences as both local and global agents of change across the continuum of coaching sessions. We present the TSPP Model as a first result of such an interdisciplinary cooperation.
Highlights
Executive coaching practice literature and training manuals insinuate that questions are omnipresent and omnirelevant in coaching, which means questions are portrayed as key agents of the overall effectiveness of coaching
While the change potential of questioning sequences has been conversation analytically assessed for neighboring helping professional interactions such as psychotherapy, hardly any research exists on the transformative power of questions in executive coaching
In order to truly understand this powerful communicative tool in executive coaching and how it contributes to the effectiveness of coaching, we need to move from the decontextualized, monological and idealized portrayal of question types in practice literature and from coding pre-defined and isolated question types towards analyzing the authentic use of questioning sequences across coaching conversations as practiced by Conversation Analysis
Summary
Executive coaching practice literature and training manuals insinuate that questions are omnipresent and omnirelevant in coaching, which means questions are portrayed as key agents of the overall effectiveness of coaching. While the (local) change potential of questioning sequences has been conversation analytically assessed for neighboring helping professional interactions such as psychotherapy (see e.g. various publications by Peräkylä and Worsøe & Jensen, this issue), hardly any research exists on the transformative power of questions in executive coaching.
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