Abstract
Workplace coaching has been established as a popular managerial development tool to support employees on all hierarchical levels. In service industries, coaching is underrepresented. This is rather surprising because more than in any other industry, the employees’ attitudes and personal job satisfaction have an impact on customers’ service perceptions. Thus, taking care of the service personnel should be a top concern for service firms. This position paper therefore presents the challenges service employees are confronted with, according to their distance to the customer, and describes how coaching may help them to overcome those challenges from a conceptual point of view. Service employees may be influenced by workplace coaching, affecting not only their work performance (i.e. skill-based outcomes), but also their attitude and personality (i.e. psychological outcomes). Theoretically, this study adds on previous research, by presenting a conceptual discussion of positive outcomes of coaching for service organizations, which is supplemented by considerations about negative or unwanted effects. Service practitioners learn that coaching can be widely applied to different employee groups and gain a differentiated perspective about conceivable positive and negative outcomes.
Highlights
The complex business environment, with many new competitors entering and the constant struggle against stagnant markets, has driven organizations to install managerial development tools, aimed at keeping their competitive advantages and increasing employee performances
One managerial development tool is workplace coaching, which has been especially praised by practitioners and scholars as key to enhance human resource assets (Ellinger et al 2011)
Coaching is a process that enables people to learn and achieve goals, but most of all, workplace coaching is a tool for taking care of the employees in the firm (Ellinger and Bostrom 1999; Deeter-Schmelz et al 2002, 2008; Sherman and Freas 2004)
Summary
The complex business environment, with many new competitors entering and the constant struggle against stagnant markets, has driven organizations to install managerial development tools, aimed at keeping their competitive advantages and increasing employee performances Coaching in service related research has been discussed in terms of a desirable management practice (managerial coaching) To this end, it has been mentioned as one out of many techniques supporting salespeople and frontline employees (Jackson et al 2006; Jackson and Sirianni 2009) and initial findings indicate that frontline employee’s perception of supervisory coaching practices can help the subjective job performance (Ellinger et al 2011; Pousa and Mathieu 2014). It has been mentioned as one out of many techniques supporting salespeople and frontline employees (Jackson et al 2006; Jackson and Sirianni 2009) and initial findings indicate that frontline employee’s perception of supervisory coaching practices can help the subjective job performance (Ellinger et al 2011; Pousa and Mathieu 2014) Given these positive indications on coaching, the objective of this positioning research is to take the perspective of coaching as a distinctive tool that is not tied to a specific role. Service practitioners learn that coaching can be widely applied to different employee groups and gain a differentiated perspective about conceivable positive and negative outcomes
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