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The Leadership Quarterly 25 (2014) 631–646 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect The Leadership Quarterly j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / l e a q u a Leadership coaching, leader role-efficacy, and trust in subordinates. A mixed methods study assessing leadership coaching as a leadership development tool Gro Ladegard a, , Susann Gjerde b a Oslo School of Management, P.O. Box 1195 Sentrum, 0107 Oslo, Norway b UMB School of Economics and Business, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, P.O. Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 19 February 2013 Received in revised form 11 December 2013 Accepted 4 February 2014 Available online 22 February 2014 Handling Editor: Kevin Lowe Keywords: Leadership coaching Relational leadership Role-efficacy Trust Leadership development a b s t r a c t In this study, we used a two-phase exploratory sequential design consisting of qualitative and quantitative research methods to assess leadership coaching as a leadership development tool. A focus group study combined with a review of theory resulted in hypotheses linking coaching to increased leader role-efficacy (LRE) and leader's trust in subordinates (LTS). Using data from leaders participating in a six month coaching program and a control group, the results showed that LRE and LTS increased in the coaching group, but not in the control group. We also hypothesized that increased trust in subordinates would be related to subordinates' psychological empowerment and turnover intentions. A significant relationship between increased LTS and reduced turnover intentions was found. Finally, we found that the degree of facilitative behavior from the coach positively affected the changes in both leader role-efficacy and trust in subordinates. While the results should be interpreted with caution as the sample is small, our findings support claims that coaching represents a promising leadership development tool. Furthermore, the results regarding trust in subordinates represent contributions to the development of a relational perspective on leadership development. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction The development of leaders is an expressed goal in most organizations (Avolio & Hannah, 2009), and leadership development has become “big business” over the last decade (PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 2010: 13). Given the role that leadership plays in the current malaise around financial crisis, climate control, and ethical debacles, which the media characterizes as a “failure of leadership” (Gardner, Lowe, Moss, Mahoney, & Claudia, 2010: 922–958), understanding how to facilitate the development of effective leadership is more crucial than ever. However, systematic investigations of leadership development interventions are rare in the literature (Avolio, Avey, & Quisenberry, 2010), and the practice of leadership development and its scientific foundation are disconnected (Day, 2000: 581). This shortage of systematic investigations and disconnection between theory and practice may result in costly leadership development programs that have unintended or no effects and may slow down the development of theory. Consequently, it is essential that leadership development program components should be evaluated scientifically (Solansky, 2010) with robust theories that can be validated and tested across empirical settings. Leadership coaching has been presented as a promising leadership development practice (Day, 2000; Ely et al., 2010) and has become a widely used intervention for leadership development (Bono, Purvanova, Towler, & Peterson, 2009; Feldman & Lankau, Corresponding author. Tel.: +47 92408441. E-mail addresses: gro.ladegard@mh.no (G. Ladegard), susann.gjerde@umb.no (S. Gjerde). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2014.02.002 1048-9843/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 632 G. Ladegard, S. Gjerde / The Leadership Quarterly 25 (2014) 631–646 2005). Leadership development can be understood as an “integration strategy by helping people understand how to relate to others, coordinate their efforts, build commitments, and develop extended social networks by applying self-understanding to social and organizational imperatives” (Day, 2000, p. 586). Leadership coaching involves one-on-one counseling of executives, leaders, and managers about work-related issues with the purpose of improving their leadership effectiveness (Ely et al., 2010; Feldman & Lankau, 2005; Stajkovic & Luthans, 1998). The promising features of leadership coaching may be found in the way that it addresses a traditional challenge in leadership development programs. When leaders enter into a common program, they have differing experiences, skills, and learning styles (Solansky, 2010). Coaching is characterized by a custom-tailored development process (Bono et al., 2009; Grant, 2006) and consequently addresses the challenge of different individual starting points. However, in line with the previously mentioned gaps in the field of leadership development, there is also a lack of systematic evaluation of this particular leadership development tool (Ely et al., 2010). To advance the field theoretically and empirically, rigorous and systematic evaluations of the effects of leadership coaching are needed (Smither, London, Flautt, Vargas, & Kucine, 2003). Because of the qualitatively different approach of leadership coaching compared with other leadership development initiatives, traditional training intervention evaluations may be insufficient to address these outcomes (Ely et al., 2010). Hence, Ely et al. (2010) provide a framework for evaluation of leadership coaching and argue that we need both summative evaluation (assessing the effectiveness) and formative evaluation (identifying areas for program improvement) to further our knowledge of leadership coaching as a leadership development tool. Drawing on their framework, the purpose of the present study is to provide summative evaluation in the form of two outcome criteria that are based in theory and practice (leader role-efficacy and trust in subordinates), and formative evaluation investigating how the coach's facilitative behavior may affect these outcome variables. In order to assess the impact of leadership coaching and to add to the knowledge base of summative evaluation, it is important to determine appropriate outcome criteria (Smither et al., 2003). However, there have been “no universally accepted criteria for what constitutes (a) successful outcome” in leadership coaching (MacKie, 2007: 310). The present study attempts to address this gap by suggesting two generic outcome variables. Because leadership coaching attends to the particular needs of the leaders, one may find that they have a large number of diverse goals and desired outcomes from coaching. We believe that the idiosyncrasy of these different goals should be taken into account when determining appropriate outcome criteria. At the same time, we need generic outcome variables based in theory that may be measured as a difference in state before and after coaching and across studies. We suggest that coaching may increase a leader's general feeling of mastery of his/her role, and we refer to this outcome as leader role efficacy (LRE). LRE may be defined as “a leader's confidence judgment in his/her ability to carry out the behaviors that comprise the leadership role” (Paglis, 2010: 772). This implies that the leaders (rather than the researchers) may determine the vital elements of their particular leadership role, to the degree that they have confidence in their abilities to attend to these, and may set their individual goals for coaching accordingly. We argue that LRE represents an outcome variable that addresses the idiosyncratic nature of leaders' coaching goals and is generic enough to be compared before and after coaching, and across leaders. LRE may be a sufficient goal in itself for individual leaders attending a coaching program. However, the effectiveness of a leadership program should also be judged according to changes experienced by the subordinates. Thus, in addition to LRE, we suggest that coaching may improve the quality of the relationship between a leader and his/her subordinates by increasing a leader's trust in his or her subordinates (LTS). Trust may contribute to strengthening the psychosocial function of the leader– subordinate relationship (as opposed to the instrumental function) and thereby may improve subordinates' perceptions of competence and effectiveness, as well as their willingness to continue their working relationship (Boyatzis, Smith, & Blame, 2006). We therefore suggest that leadership coaching will have an effect on the subordinates in terms of increased psychological empowerment and reduced turnover intention. The present study develops and tests hypotheses on these expected outcomes. Furthermore, responding to the call for formative measures that may provide prescriptive information to improve coaching (Ely et al., 2010: 591), we investigate how the coach's facilitative behavior will affect the outcomes of leadership coaching. In line with the framework of Ely et al. (2010) as well as a large body of literature on coaching, we suggest that facilitative coach behavior (challenge, support, and feedback) impacts on learning outcomes. The objective of the study is first to contribute to substantive theory building on leadership coaching as a leadership development tool. We suggest that LRE and LTS should be included in conceptual models of leadership coaching effectiveness. Second, we contribute empirically to the field of leadership development and leadership coaching through a rigorous test of the outcomes of coaching as well as antecedents to coaching effectiveness. Finally, we aim to generate knowledge that may benefit practitioners and human resource managers responsible for leadership development in their organization. The study was conducted in several steps using a mixed methods design in which elements of qualitative and quantitative research methods were combined (Johnson, Onwuegbuzie, & Turner, 2007). A two-phase exploratory sequential design (Creswell · Clark, 2011) was chosen to address different research questions: What generic outcome criteria should be used to assess the effect of leadership coaching? Does leadership coaching have a positive effect on these outcome criteria? To what extent do differences in facilitative coach behavior influence this effect? An additional reason for choosing this research design was that it enables a more comprehensive account of leadership as a leadership development tool. In the first part of our study, we conducted a focus group discussion with experienced coaches to provide us with valuable outcome variables that were based in both practice and theory. Second, we conducted a quasi-experimental field study with leaders who attended a six-month coaching program and their subordinates. We gathered pre- and posttest measures from the intervention group (hereafter referred to as the “coaching group”) and a control group, each group including both leaders and subordinates. In the second step, G. Ladegard, S. Gjerde / The Leadership Quarterly 25 (2014) 631–646 633 we tested the effects of the coaching program on the outcome variables that were revealed in the first part of our study (LRE and LTS) and compared the coaching group with the control group. Third, we investigated changes in subordinates' psychological empowerment and turnover intentions, and their association with changes in the leaders' trust. Fourth, we conducted regression analyses on the coaching group of 24 leaders, regressing LRE and LTS on the coach's facilitative behavior (controlling for the variance at T1) to test the effects of the coach's behavior on the outcome variables. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the outcome