The case against coaching

Abstract

Unsurprisingly, strong and growing interest in the effectiveness of workplace and executive coaching is yielding an increasing and consistent body of significant findings. Firstly, over the past 25 years coaching has enjoyed sustained growth inside larger organisations, with processes, codes of conduct and qualifications becoming more and more standardised. This has helped researchers to increasingly find realistic setting for doing research. Secondly, coaching takes place in tightly contracted, delineated, one-to-one conversations which can be easily quantified for research purposes. With the interventions being limited to the conversations and the sessions normally taking place in a neutral venue, a natural laboratory situation for the measurement of effectiveness has emerged which cannot be found for adjacent fields such as mentoring, team coaching, process consultation, leadership development programmes and OD consulting. Over recent years, the focused study of ‘adverse experiences’ or ‘negative side effects’ of coaching has remained relatively small and mostly disjunct from the effectiveness studies. This article provides a full review and reappraisal of those studies into the case against coaching, integrating them with what is known about negative side effects within quantitative coaching research, and proposes a vision for carrying this research forward.Keywords:executive coaching; outcome research; effectiveness of coaching; side effects; null findings.