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The purpose of this paper is to examine where and how coaching and mentoring disciplines overlap or differ in approach. Coaching and mentoring have emerged as important interventions as the role of helping relationships have gained prominence in human resource development. However, there appear to be contexts where one or other is preeminent, without consistent explanation of their suitability. Such inconsistency arguably creates confusion and doubt about these interventions and their efficacy notably amongst those who commission such interventions and their potential beneficiaries. This study focuses on this inconsistency of coaching or mentoring by exploring practitioners’ approaches within six disciplines: executive coaches, coaching psychologists, sports coaches, mentors of leaders, mentors of newly qualified teachers and mentors of young people, with the aim of assisting those seeking support with development.

This exploratory study was undertaken using a qualitative methodology, where in-depth interviews were completed with experienced practitioners to elucidate their approaches and practice.

The findings show that approaches may be discipline-specific, where practitioners specialise in a particular type of coaching or mentoring requiring distinctive knowledge and/or skills. However, the sharing of good practice across disciplines and the value of understanding the common dimensions which emerged is also evident, providing clients and those who commission coaching and mentoring with reassurances regarding the nature of these helping relationships.

As the research focused only on the practitioners’ experiences of their work in these disciplines, it is vital that the mentees’ and coachees’ experiences are captured in future research. There is also value in further exploration of the model developed.

By deploying the model concerned with the future development of these interventions suggests practitioners can expand their capacity and scope by adopting interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches.

By directly exploring the shared and distinctive approaches of coaching and mentoring practitioners in six contexts, this study provides opportunities to understand where practitioners can benefit from imparting best practice across these interventions and highlighting specific aspects for their context.

The purpose of this research is to create a definition of peer coaching using literature from various and disparate organizational and educational contexts. This research is intended to clarify what constitutes peer coaching overall, and guide the ever-growing practice of peer coaching.

This research uses a combination of inductive and deductive qualitative approaches through the implementation of qualitative content analysis (QDA). The research used a data reduction process with 87 existing scholarly articles in the area of peer coaching, in which the researchers focused on selected aspects of the data and followed the practice of staying close to manifest artifacts within the data.

The results of the qualitative data analysis indicated that five themes emerged within the literature. Themes were as follows: program structure, purpose and goals of peer coaching, peer coaching processes and mechanisms in which peer coaching is conducted, outcomes of peer coaching and relational contexts and functions of peer coaching relationships.

While there is an increase in peer coaching, research on this type of coaching is scarce with few empirical studies on the topic: what has been conducted has not been particularity reliable (Hagen and Peterson, 2014); and most of the published research is limited to education, nursing, other medical contexts and non-profit organizations. This research helps to clarify the nature of peer coaching and create a cogent definition that defines formal peer coaching within all peer coaching contexts.

This chapter focuses on two major concepts in entrepreneurship training, namely coaching and mentoring. A study of these concepts reveals at least two schools of thought, that coaching and mentoring are two parallel and distinct activities that can be used to support each other, and that coaching and mentoring are not separate activities — coaching is considered part of the mentoring activity or mentoring part of the coaching activity. Data from 36 university-based training programmes and 450 coaching and mentoring cases at 7 Swedish universities were analysed. We used a checklist to gather information on 21 items linked to these 4 distinctive groups: first structural issues (mission, form and task); second, process issues (i.e. connection to programme content, meeting environment, problem solving, assessing the opportunity or idea, operative role, confidentiality and networking); third relationship (i.e. extent, meeting, initiative, homework, documentation and follow-up) and fourth character of the coach and mentor (background and experience, engagement, integrity, social skills and role or ethics).

Coaching and mentoring differed markedly, for example in terms of mission, problem solving and use of generalist versus specialist competence. Similarities occurred in the areas of opportunity or idea assessment, and meeting environment, operative role and confidentiality agreements. The authors are convinced that the coach and the mentor have different roles in helping the young individual to become a better entrepreneur. Coaching and mentoring were found to be parallel activities that complement each other.

This paper aims to show how polarity coaching can foster meaningful change among executive clients through sponsoring a deeper understanding and acceptance of interdependent opposites.

The study explores what is required from the coach and the coaching relationship and how clients can be supported in overcoming polarity traps. A social constructionist and sense‐making approach to coaching is followed and the paper draws on relevant literature from the fields of psychotherapy, coaching, and dialogical change.

It is shown that before engaging in polarity coaching it is important for coaches to become aware of the polarity tensions that are prevalent in their own work and to explore their personal preferences when facing these tensions. A coach who is able to hold interdependent opposites with ease in the coaching encounter will allow clients to experience transformation on a deeper level.

The core of the paper is the polarity‐coaching model, which describes how coaches can guide their clients through a process of discovering polarized thinking, pole exploration, and boundary softening for becoming more comfortable with interdependent opposites. The paper will be of interest to those in the field of coaching executives.

Team coaching is a promising way to advance a shift from the classical leader to a coach who leads his/her interprofessional colleagues. It is acknowledged as an effective instrument to reinforce leaders’ roles but is rarely used in the health-care sector. This paper aims to present the team leader coaching programme (TLCP), designed to strengthen team leaders by implementing coaching tools into their work routine.

The TLCP was designed based on the evaluated intervention on patient-centred team development, an expert workshop and a literature search. It addresses leadership styles, self-reflection, role clarity, attitude, moderation techniques and coaching tools with a focus on systemic questions. It was implemented as a train-the-trainer concept, in two training groups including 27 participants from 12 clinics (“multi-clinic” group) and another in-house training group (“single-clinic” group) including 15 participants from one clinic.

There were differences in the evaluation of the training between the group that received an inhouse training (“single-clinic” group) and the group that received a workshop in a group of professions from different clinics (“multi-clinic” group) with a tendency for a more positive evaluation by the “multi-clinic” group.

The TLCP is a promising programme to potentially improve teamwork in rehabilitation clinics, as it provides team leaders with coaching tools they can use in their work routine without being dependent on external coaches. It is characterized by a reflective stance, which seems to be highly necessary to optimally fulfil the role of a team leader.

This article aims to test the effectiveness of coaching for middle and executive level managers within a large recruiting organization.

Participants set goals to achieve during a 12‐month coaching programme. The sample consisted of middle managers (n=30) and executive managers (n=29) involved in US Army recruiting. Outcomes included measures of coached participants' achievement of quota and personal goals, and assessment on nine leader competencies and buy‐in over the one‐year coaching period.

Coached managers outperformed un‐coached, but experienced/incumbent counterparts. The strongest impact of coaching on performance was for middle managers and their subordinates (as opposed to executive managers). Both groups of participants demonstrated growth on some dimensions of recruiter‐leader competencies and achievement of self‐set goals.

A small and nontraditional sample of military recruiters was used. Future researchers can build on the approach outlined here to more concretely evaluate the impact of their coaching efforts in other populations.

Coaching all recruiter managers could translate into a return on investment of several thousand additional recruits. In addition, the achievement of personally relevant goals with the help of coaching, the development of leader competencies indicates real benefit associated with this form of goal‐based coaching.

We offer one of the first empirical evaluations of the effectiveness of a goal‐based leader coaching intervention. Practitioners and researchers can benefit from this approach by using it to improve coaching effectiveness and demonstrate value to the clients they serve.

In this paper, the authors act as leadership development coaches who show that how a story is constructed, reconstructed and circulated in and through organizations make stories themselves active “players” in creating relationships. In turn, these relationships create leadership development opportunities. The authors also explain why some people need to listen to the whole story before they can draw conclusions about its parts, about why some people do not care about others', stories and about why some storytellers do not care about the characters in the story. The combination of these characteristics gives a more detailed view of storyselling that, necessarily, works with storytelling as tools used in coaching for leadership development. The purpose of the paper is to describe further the origins of storytelling and storyselling and their relationship to leadership development coaching, and to demonstrate how the movement of a story told and sold create leadership development opportunities.

This paper is informed by a psychodynamic understanding of organizations and examines a case study to illustrate the theoretical views that are advanced.

The employment of sociograms is found to be a useful way to chart and understand the relational dynamics of stories as quasi‐objects and their fragile and ephemeral nature. The authors find that stories can be usefully considered as both quasi and transitional objects.

Psychodynamic theory informs the process of storytelling and storyselling. The implied art of storytelling and storyselling derived from research analysis are the catalysts for understanding why and how researchers put forward their findings and conclusions in scientific study.

The pracademic approach evident in this paper makes theory more accessible and useable in the field of practice. One branch of psychodynamics informs storytelling theory as it applies to the practice of coaching for leadership development.

The paper's originality lies in the development of potential time and the application of this concept in the creation of leadership development opportunities and leadership development coaching.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors impacting successful coaching of expatriates.

Data were gathered from 25 semi-structured interviews of coached expatriates, coaches and HR professionals. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to analyze and interpret the data.

Altogether, 16 factors impacting expatriate coaching success were identified. They were categorized with respect to the four-quadrant framework of Wilber. The findings suggest, for example, that coaching success is impacted by: from the coach and coachee as individuals perspective, international experience of the coach; from the coaching relationship perspective, coaching language and managerial leadership style; from the behaviors, processes, models and techniques perspective, a clear contract with objectives and evaluation, and challenging behavior of the coach; and from the systems perspective, organizational support.

Coaching processes, tools and techniques should be adapted to the needs and situation of the assignee. It would be beneficial if organizations ensured that their coaches are internationally experienced and that their managerial leadership style supports coaching. Coaching should be clearly defined and contracted with goals and evaluation. Coaching tools and techniques suitable for international coaching should be added to coach-training programs.

Given the paucity of expatriate coaching research, and the fact that expatriation continues to be a key component of the international management field, this paper contributes to coaching and expatriate research by identifying factors that give expatriate coaching success and by analyzing and presenting them using Wilber’s systemic four-quadrant framework.

Dyadic services research has increasingly focused on helping providers facilitate transformative service conversations with consumers. Extant research has thoroughly documented the conversational skills that providers can use to facilitate consumer microtransformations (i.e. small changes in consumers’ thoughts, feelings and action plans toward their well-being goals). At the same time, extant research has largely neglected the role of servicescape design in transformative service conversations despite some evidence of its potential significance. To redress this oversight, this article aims to examine how servicescape design can be used to better facilitate consumer microtransformations in dyadic service conversations.

This article is based on an interpretive study of mental health services (i.e. counseling, psychotherapy and coaching). Both providers and consumers were interviewed about their lived experiences of service encounters. Informants frequently described the spatial and temporal dimensions of their service encounters as crucial to their experiences of service encounters. These data are interpreted through the lens of servicescape design theory, which disentangles servicescape design effects into dimensions, strategies, tactics, experiences and outcomes.

The data reveal two servicescape design strategies that help facilitate consumer microtransformations. “Service sequestration” is a suite of spatial design tactics (e.g., private offices) that creates strong consumer protections for emotional risk-taking. “Service serialization” is a suite of temporal design tactics (e.g., recurring appointments) that creates predictable rhythms for emotional risk-taking. The effects of service sequestration and service serialization on consumer microtransformations are mediated by psychological safety and psychological readiness, respectively.

The article details concrete servicescape design tactics that providers can use to improve consumer experiences and outcomes in dyadic service contexts. These tactics can help promote consumer microtransformations in the short run and consumer well-being in the long run.

This article develops a conceptual model of servicescape design strategies for transformative service conversations. This model explains how and why servicescape design can influence consumer microtransformations. The article also begins to transfer servicescape design tactics from mental health services to other dyadic services that seek to facilitate consumer microtransformations. Examples of such services include career counseling, divorce law, financial advising, geriatric social work, nutrition counseling, personal styling and professional organizing.