Elaine Cox ✉ (Oxford Brookes University)

In this issue of the IJEBCM we are pleased to welcome researchers from Spain, UK, Australia, India, USA, Singapore and the Netherlands. We have eight peer reviewed papers, two reflections from the field and one book review. The peer-reviewed papers tackle a range of coaching and mentoring research ranging from mentoring entrepreneurial women to the experience of positive psychology coaching, while the reflections from the field focus on the evolution of coaching and mentoring and an evaluation of a peer helpers programme. Our book review evaluates Innovations in Leadership Coaching which is edited by Terry Hildebrandt and colleagues and published by Fielding University Press, California.

Peer Reviewed Papers

The first paper in this issue is from Joanna Jarosz working at the University of Silesia in Barcelona. The paper, very topically, looks at the impact of coaching on the well-being and performance of managers and their teams during the current COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, after the World Health Organization announced the spread of the outbreak, most companies were forced to shift to some kind of remote working. As a result well-being, mental health and performance suffered following adjustments to the unexpected changes, worries about family, feelings of confusion or simply the technical issues when working from home. This study reveals an approach to coaching that may be efficient in enhancing the well-being and performance of managers and teams during the pandemic. The study contributes to the growing empirical evidence of the benefit of coaching in this and other crisis scenarios.

In our second paper Chris Wood and Tim Lomas from University of East London in the UK,
Examine the role of courage in the development and practice of coaches. The constructivist grounded theory design seeks to understand the role that courage plays in the development and practice of coaches. The perspectives of 12 coaches of varying levels of experience were sought and revealed that courage is required throughout a coaching career. It was found that courage enables coaches to deliver their best work and is integral to an ongoing cycle of increasing self-awareness and professional development.

The third paper in this issue is from Rick Ladyshewsky and Brooke Sanderson researching in Australia. It focuses on the best practices of experienced clinical educators in relation to peer coaching and health science practicums. The authors contend that while peer coaching can occur informally, failure to formalise the process and train participants can negatively impact rapport-building and learning outcomes. As a consequence, this research examined the best practices of 31 highly experienced clinical educators within a peer coaching placement model and captured their explicit and tacit supervisory knowledge.

Our next paper presents the ABCD Map: a personal construct approach to coaching supervision. In this conceptual paper Carmelina Lawton Smith, from Oxford Brookes University in the UK, explains how a growing number of coaching supervision models are available but that none, as yet, is based on personal construct theory (PCT). Lawton Smith argues that PCT could provide a suitable foundation for coaching supervision and proposes a model based on this theory.

The fifth paper is from Tia Moin and Christian van Nieuwerburgh from the University of East London, UK. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) study was designed to explore the experience of positive psychology coaching following unconscious bias training. The focus was the lived experience of four professionals who took part in positive psychology coaching after following an implicit association test and unconscious bias training. Interview data revealed that participants were self-conscious about being perceived negatively and experienced deep introspection and reflexivity. However, participants also reported increased self-efficacy and felt safe to discuss previously avoided personal issues.

The sixth paper examines studies the effect of mentoring on job performance among Indian millennials. In this quantitative study, colleagues Chatterjee, Dey and Chaturvedi from the Birla Institute of Management Technology, collected data from 122 Indian millennial mentees and used a 23-item questionnaire on mentoring and job performance. Mentors also assessed mentees’ job performance. Correlation, regression, and SEM analyses confirmed that mentoring influenced total job performance as well as contextual and task performance. The findings from this study should help organizations devise and implement more specific mentoring programs for millennials.

In the penultimate research paper, Arantza Arruti form Bilbao in Spain, reports the perceived benefits of mentoring among nascent entrepreneur women. A quantitative methodology was used to gather information on perceptions and opinions of participants in a ‘MET’ mentoring community programme over a period of three years. Results show that due to the programme, women perceive themselves more competent, show a high level of job satisfaction and degree of progress, are able to identify new business opportunities, expand their vision and improve their business performance.

Our final peer-reviewed offer concerns employee coachability and looks at new insights to increase employee adaptability, performance, and promotability within organisations. Jake Weiss and Maureen Merrigan from the USA used a survey-based design, to explain the behaviours of highly coachable employees, i.e. those proactively seeking, demonstrating receptivity to, and implementing constructive feedback. The paper examines the critical outcomes they achieved, while controlling for the influence of other effective managerial coaching behaviours. Findings demonstrate employee coachability drives individual job performance, adaptability, and promotability to a greater extent than effective managerial coaching behaviours.

Reflections from the field

The first of our reflections is from Ruud Koopman and colleagues from the Netherlands. It describes the seemingly concurrent chronological growth in popularity of coaching and mentoring. The authors
show that coaching and mentoring share a lot, but they are often treated as separate fields. By exploring models that combine the concepts of coaching and mentoring, the authors provide a base for more rigorous research.

The second reflection from the field is a qualitative evaluation of the Peer Helpers Programme at Singapore Management University. Here, Angela Koh and Michelle Cheong, examine the impact of peer helper training via personal interviews with 11 alumni peer helpers. The aims were to find evidence of benefits and innovative practice that support peer helper learning and enhance curriculum and training. A content analysis revealed developing external partnerships, exploring certification and engaging in internationalisation to enhance curriculum, training and practice at the organisational level. At the programme level, the suggestions were to better relate peer helping to future readiness.

1 February 2021