Keen to help? Managers’ implicit person theories and their subsequent employee coaching

Although coaching can facilitate employee development and perfor-mance, the stark reality is that managers often differ substantially in their inclination to coach their subordinates. To address this issue, we draw from and build upon a body of social psychology research that finds that implicit person theories (IPTs) about the malleability of per-sonal attributes (e.g., personality and ability) affect one’s willingness to help others. Specifically, individuals holding an “entity theory ” that human attributes are innate and unalterable are disinclined to invest in helping others to develop and improve, relative to individuals who hold the “incremental theory ” that personal attributes can be developed. Three studies examined how managers ’ IPTs influence the extent of their employee coaching. First, a longitudinal field study found that managers ’ IPTs predicted employee evaluations of their subsequent em-ployee coaching. This finding was replicated in a second field study. Third, an experimental study found that using self-persuasion principles to induce incremental IPTs increased entity theorist managers ’ willing-ness to coach a poor performing employee, as well as the quantity and quality of their performance improvement suggestions. The first study in this manuscript was presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Honolulu, HI, August 2005. The third study in this manuscript was presented at the annual conference of the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Chicago