Executive coaching as a value creating tool for organizations : what is the perceived impact of coaching on the companies that fund the process?

Coaching is an increasingly popular tool for organizational purposes. Companies see value in implementing coaching for a variety of reasons and believe that coaching outcomes have an impact on their employees in a positive manner which returns value to the organization (Brock, 2014). Coaching as an industry has grown exponentially over the last few decades and is at a critical point in its development. There is a lack of consensus among practitioners and theorists on what direction the industry should take. There is disagreement on how the concept is defined, how coaching should be applied, what qualifications coaching calls for and how coaching outcomes should be measured (Newsom & Dent, 2011). Although there is correlation in growth of research with the growth of the industry, research has been unable to keep up with this growth of coaching in practice and has been unable to provide a concrete guideline or form a strong foundation for coaching to continue to grow in a unified direction (Hamlin, Ellinger, & Beattie, 2009). There are many areas to coaching that require further research such as determining the organizational value gained from executive coaching. This research attempts to address this gap with an exploratory study from the organizational perspective of the impact coaching has on the company that pays for the coaching. The objective is to gain a deeper understanding on how the company representatives’ perceive the coaching process, why they choose to implement or offer coaching within their companies, how they do so and in what manner. The findings of this study indicate that coaching does leave a positive impact on the companies that apply it and that the expectations the company representatives have are met. The purpose, which can vary, seems to be irrelevant when it comes to returned value if the expectations are defined beforehand. However, there is a clear lack of any measurement to evaluate the true effectiveness and mostly the success is determined on subjective terms. It is concluded that there is clear indication that coaching has a positive impact on organizations but there is need for further research to determine the best practises of coaching and how this impact can be best evaluated beyond subjective means. Keywords: Executive Coaching, Organizational Value, ROI, Performance Management, Leadership Development, Sustainable Chang