A practitioner’s perspective on coaching effectiveness

In the past decades, coaching has grown into a two-billion-dollar industry worldwide, and organizations increasingly rely on it as a human-resource development (HRD) tool. Consequently, the question of how coaching effectiveness can be measured is a central topic of discussion in both coaching practice and research. Currently, there is no unified answer to this question because researchers have used diverse indicators of coaching success. Three meta-analytic investigations showed that coaching can have positive effects (Jones, Wood, & Guillemeau, 2016; Sonesh et al., 2015; Theeboom, Beersma, & van Vianen, 2014) and that the different classifications are possible to examine coaching success indicators (CSIs). To date, there is no research that investigated whether these CSIs are actually utilized by coaching practitioners to evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions. As such, this chapter uses a concept-mapping approach to shed light on the CSIs that coaching practitioners use to assess the effectiveness of their own interventions and the relative importance that these practitioners ascribe to these CSIs. Specifically, it intends to explore and describe practitioners’ mental representation of coaching effectiveness