Management Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2023
Abstract
Leadership coaching—a relational process by which a professional coach works with a leader to support their development—is a common component of learning and development portfolios in organizations. Despite broad agreement about the importance of the coaching relationship, relational processes remain undertheorized, failing to account for the growth and intertwining of coach-leader self-concepts as they engage in a generative and co-creative coaching process. To address these shortcomings, we reconceptualize the relational process within coaching as one of relational self-expansion and theorize that the communication channel and communication quality impact relational self-expansion which, in turn, influences coaching effectiveness. Our hypotheses are tested in a field experiment featuring random assignment to experimental conditions (communication channels) in which a coaching intervention was deployed in five organizations. Using structural equation modeling, we demonstrated that communication quality and relational self-expansion during the coaching process positively predicted coaching effectiveness. Contrary to expectations, communication quality did not differ by channel (phone, videoconference, face-to-face) nor did it predict relational self-expansion.
Recommended Citation
Passarelli, A.M., Trinh, M.P., Van Oosten, E.B. and Varley, A., 2023. Communication quality and relational self‐expansion: The path to leadership coaching effectiveness. Human Resource Management, 62(4), pp.661-680. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22156
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Human Resource Management
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22156
Included in
Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, Educational Leadership Commons
Comments
© 2022 The Authors. Human Resource Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.