Elaine Cox (Oxford Brookes University)
Published online: 03 February 2025
© the Author(s) Published by Oxford Brookes University
Elaine Cox, Oxford Brookes University
Welcome to our editorial for the first issue of IJEBCM in 2025. Here we in introduce the 24 papers in three sections: 14 peer reviewed coaching papers, 6 mentoring papers and a further 4 shorter practitioner papers in our ‘Reflections from the Field’ section - a space dedicated to shorter articles designed to prompt further research and discussion.
The coaching section suggests some important themes are emerging. As well as the more usual focus on coaching effectiveness, we have seen a growing number of papers on the use of coaching in healthcare – for supporting patients and carers and promoting wellbeing in the workplace. Another theme is how to improve coaching practice, especially via the use of arts based interventions or using artificial intelligence. Our mentoring papers focus mainly on provision for different target groups, such as leaders, trainee teachers, undergraduates, or migrants.
In their paper ‘What makes a ‘good’ coach?’ Andrew George and Susan Rose from Henley Business School, examine the virtues needed to be a good coach. They first looked what key stakeholders understand about the virtues of coaches and identified six virtues: wisdom, temperance, courage, loyalty, non-judgemental and attentive. The resulting framework is considered useful for professional reflection and the training and development of coaches, as well as future research.
In our next paper, entitled ‘Enhancing performance, self-efficacy and well-being,’ Réka Gerhát and colleagues from the University of Debrecen, Hungary, present a randomised controlled study examining the effectiveness of Solution-Focused Brief Coaching. The study involved 84 white-collar workers in an organisational setting. Results suggested significant and sustained improvements in performance, self-efficacy, well-being, and positive affect.
In the third paper, Joanna Jarosz from Spain and Rick Cartor from the USA introduce a Coaching Effectiveness Framework. Drawing on the scientific literature and findings from qualitative and quantitative research, the paper introduces a framework focusing on competencies and outcomes for organizational application. They further highlight key skills and behaviours for effective coaching and offer practical insights for coaching training.
In a paper called ‘From business to caring: the conceptualisation of holistic coaching for cancer patients,’ Andrew Marren and colleagues from the University of Portsmouth, conduct a review of current health coaching research. The review covered illness identity and communication processes to highlight how coaching is appropriate for cancer patients facing uncertainty. A conceptual framework for holistic coaching in cancer is presented.
The next paper focuses on the impact of coaching on the wellbeing of informal cancer carers. Jo Collins from Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent explains how such informal carers experience lower wellbeing than the general population. Her qualitative study delivered a 4-session coaching intervention with 11 cancer carers, using post-intervention interviews to ascertain the impact of coaching on carers’ wellbeing. Findings suggest non-directive coaching improves carer wellbeing by building a ‘safe space’ for them to be heard, and giving them permission to prioritize themselves.
Our next paper focuses on the impact of life coaching with university students. Levi Huffman and colleagues from Indiana Wesleyan University, USA. The study details the outcomes of providing professional life coaching to undergraduates using 10 years of quantitative and qualitative data. After receiving coaching, diverse students reported even greater gains than white students in efficacy and confidence. This mixed-methods study thus reveals significant evidence that providing professional life coaching to undergraduates can be an effective method to develop young adults, enhance retention, and increase well-being and life satisfaction.
Our next paper focuses on coaching for financial effectiveness. In this qualitative study Ana Silva and colleagues from Merrimack College, USA, summarise qualitative data from a field experiment exploring a coaching intervention in a low-income, minority community. The program aimed to develop clients' financial capability focusing on client driven goals. Analysis suggests most participants had a goal of saving money but had difficulties saving. Ultimately, they were able to save during the intervention. Findings support coaching as an intervention for building financial capability and suggest a program to train college students in personal finance, coaching, and intercultural skills to effectively support low-income families.
Our next three papers explore the use of arts-based coaching interventions. The first, from Debbie Fisher and Andrea Giraldez-Hayes, researching in the UK, examines how coaches and clients experience a coaching session after listening to music. In the study the authors explore how the coach and client experience a coaching session when listening to music preselected by the client. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings indicate that clients strengthened their connection with the coach.
In the next paper, Elizabeth Ahmann, Micah Saviet, and Marybeth Missenda, from the USA, looked at art-making as a gateway to the inner self via a phenomenological exploration of the use of intuitive collage as a tool in coaching. Analysis suggested intuitive collage may be a vehicle for expanding the coaching repertoire and accessing client creativity, intuition, and awareness. Future research could inform best practices for its use.
In their second paper for this issue, Elizabeth Ahmann, Micah Saviet, and Marybeth Missenda explore sharing poetry in the health and wellness coaching engagement. Here they recognise that some coaches have reported benefits when sharing poetry with clients, but that there is little research on the use of poetry in the coaching engagement. This phenomenological study explored perceptions of poetry as a tool for health and wellness coaching among 40 coaches enrolled in an online advanced coaching skills class. Six overarching themes were identified: discernment, logistics, impact on coaching, effect on the client, mechanisms, and the coach’s personal experience. The study may prompt coaches and researchers to explore novel approaches for eliciting enhanced client insights and awareness.
Our next paper focuses on coaches’ verbal behaviours. In a paper entitled ‘What do coaches say?’ James Gavin and colleagues from Concordia University in Canada, investigate coaches’ verbal interactions based on analyses of 48 sets of three consecutive coaching sessions. Findings suggest that, for the most part, intervention profiles align with the guidance from professional coaching associations for effective coaching practice.
In their study of the role of visuals, imagery, and verbal preferences in goal attainment and chatbot adoption, Nicky Terblanche from Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and Yaron Prywes of Cglobal Consulting, New York, investigate the effect of images on coaching efficacy. They compare a text-only coachbot (TextBot, n=126) with a text+images bot (ImageBot, n=116) and measure goal attainment and technology adoption together with users’ preferences for imagery and verbal modes of communication. The concept of “AI coach customization” is introduced.
Our next coaching paper is from Fenella Trevillion from Oxford, UK. Trevillion presents a fascinating self-inquiry into how her race and whiteness impacts her coaching practice. As a white person coaching people of colour, the systemic racism inherent in George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 drew her attention to the potential for racism in coaching. So, through internal reflection and action, and ‘disrupting her whiteness,’ her worldview changed. The paper explains the methodology of autoethnography and the pivotal points of change that came through critical reflection and illustrates the author’s new perspective on race equity in coaching and in supervision.
Our final coaching paper focuses on how group coaching can support the career advancement of women. Priscila Filleti and Rebecca Jones from Henley Business School, in the UK present a quantitative study that assesses the impact of women-only group coaching on social capital, self-esteem, resilience, courage and career advancement. Results revealed significantly higher bridging capital and courage in coached women compared to participants who did not receive coaching. Coached women were also more likely to receive a pay rise, providing empirical support for interventions aimed at promoting female career advancement.
In our first mentoring paper, Jonathan Kroll and Regina O’Neill, researching in Boston, USA, look at leadership in peer group mentoring. Noting that in this context traditional notions of top-down leadership and hierarchical decision-making are purposefully avoided, they explore how leadership manifested in peer mentoring groups. A narrative inquiry methodology was used to capture the voices and experiences of twelve peer mentoring group participants. Findings suggest leadership was necessary to ensure coordination of administrative tasks as well as to facilitate healthy exchanges between group members.
Our second mentoring paper explores the influence of mentoring relationships on Gen-Z employees in Nigeria's service sectors. Valerie Onyia Babatope from McMaster University, Canada, reports how mentorship connections affect the loyalty of Generation Z workers in Nigeria, specifically at KPMG and Zenith Bank. The study used a combination of surveys and interviews to gather data and results show a slight negative link between mentoring and loyalty at both KPMG (r = 0.343, p <.05) and Zenith Bank (r = 0.140, p >.05). Nevertheless, qualitative feedback indicates that 84.3% of KPMG participants and 73% of Zenith Bank participants recognized the beneficial influence of mentorship on career support.
Next, Jennifer Giancola and colleagues from Saint Louis University, USA explored the development of a mentee behaviour scale for workplace mentoring partnerships. They developed and tested a mentee behaviour scale (MBS) to assess mentors’ and mentees’ perceptions of effective mentee behaviours. The construct and items were derived from the literature and their experience of implementing workplace mentoring programmes. Using a multistep analysis, the MBS was reduced to 24-items with mentee and mentor versions. Results supported the scale’s reliability and validity for use in workplace mentoring research and practice.
In the next paper, concentrating on the perspectives of STEM faculty toward undergraduate mentorship, Pamela Martínez Oquendo and Morgan Vogel from the University of Nebraska Omaha, USA, uncovered the perspectives of STEM faculty toward undergraduate mentorship. They used a case study methodology with six STEM faculty members. Using the theoretical framework proposed by Crisp and Cruz (2009), they found that STEM faculty-student mentoring relationships involve strong psychological support.
In the penultimate mentoring paper, focusing on mentoring student teachers in Ireland’s further education and training sector, Deirdre Tinnelly of the National College of Ireland in Dublin, explores the lived experiences of initial teacher education mentors in the further education and training sector in Ireland. Tinnelly’s interpretivist phenomenological analysis study is based on semi-structured interviews with four mentors, and is underpinned by Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field, and capital. Findings suggest mentors perform wide ranging functions to support their student teacher, but not all mentors reported benefits from performing the role.
The final mentoring paper in this issue is titled, ‘Empowering Newcomers’ and it looks at power asymmetries and negotiations between newly arrived migrants and volunteers within buddy programmes. Gaëlle Mortier and colleagues from the University of Antwerp, Belgium undertook a qualitative study investigating how power asymmetries between volunteers (buddies) and immigrant newcomers are characterised. They drew on interview data to scrutinise how power is reproduced and negotiated in dyadic relationships within buddy programmes. Findings provide important insights for policy and practice.
In our first paper in this section, Anna Carissa Rozzo from University of Glasgow, UK explored lecturers’ goal-setting using a coaching framework. The paper presents a small-scale study aimed at investigating how academic staff articulate professional goals. Methods included semi-structured interviews and resulted in nuanced detail of the motivation for, and attributes of, participants' goals through expressed patterns of meaning. The study highlights the potential efficacy of integrating coaching tools into qualitative research methodologies.
Next, Azin Taghipour and colleagues from the Islamic Azad University of Central Tehran in Iran, investigated how organizational coaching can influence innovative work behaviour, employee voice, and work motivation. They used a quantitative, quasi-experimental design with a pre-post-test approach. Thirty participants from an Iranian online job agency took part in this semi-experimental study, with fifteen employees joining a ten-week face-to-face coaching program. Findings show that organizational coaching had a significant and positive impact on employee innovative work behaviour, employee voice, and work motivation. Our third reflection paper is from Croia Loughnane and colleagues researching in Ireland. The paper is a team’s reflection on a digital, text-based positive health coaching intervention for healthcare professionals. The authors explore a coach’s reflections during a recent randomised controlled trial that examined the feasibility of text-based digital coaching for healthcare workers. The coach’s reflective journal, analysed via reflexive thematic analysis, shows the potential scalability of text-based coaching, in addition to connection and significant rapport building despite nonverbal cues.
Our final paper in this issue is a comparative evaluation of an AI-powered life coach versus traditional coaching methods. David Brown and Marlene Orozco researching in the USA assess the efficacy of an AI-powered life coaching tool (1440), in comparison to traditional human coaching. Using a controlled experimental design, participants were divided into three distinct groups and engaged in a standardized coaching scenario. The study evaluates the performance of the tool across multiple key metrics, including goal achievement, satisfaction, and perceived support. Findings indicate that 1440 significantly outperforms traditional human coaching in several critical dimensions, suggesting its potential as a scalable and accessible alternative for personal development and professional growth.
Elaine Cox 1 February 2025