LEAD 6133 Module 3 Evidence Review on Coaching and Leadership Effectiveness Example

Does Coaching Make Better Leaders? What a Systematic Review, a Controlled Trial and a Study of 1,895 Coaching Pairs Say, and What They Mean for a Small Health Center

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6133: Models of Leadership and Coaching

Module 3 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 26, 2026

Introduction

Two modules into this course, I have chosen the leadership and coaching approaches I mean to use with the five team leads who report to me. Before I invest scarce time in coaching them, I need to know whether coaching actually makes leaders more effective, and which features of coaching matter. This paper reviews three kinds of evidence, a systematic review of executive coaching outcomes, a controlled study linking coaching to leadership behavior and a large study of what makes coaching work, and draws implications for a small health center.

What Counts as Evidence Here

Coaching research faces a basic problem: many studies ask coachees whether coaching helped them, and people who invested time in coaching tend to say yes. Stronger evidence comes from designs with comparison groups, from ratings by people other than the coachee, such as the coachee's staff, and from outcomes the organization cares about. In the review below, each study is described by what it measured and who did the measuring, because those details determine how much weight it can bear.

A Systematic Review of Outcomes

Athanasopoulou and Dopson (2018) systematically reviewed research on executive coaching outcomes. Most studies they reviewed reported positive outcomes, but those outcomes were mainly for the individual coachee, such as self-awareness, confidence and behavior change, and were often reported by coachees themselves. Outcomes for organizations and for the people the coachee leads were studied far less, and the authors argued that the coaching process and the context in which coaching happens deserve more attention, as their title suggests in asking whether the journey or the destination matters most. For my purposes, the review establishes that coaching often helps the person coached, while leaving open whether it helps that person's team.

A Controlled Study of Leadership Behavior

MacKie (2014) offers stronger evidence on the question I care about. In a controlled study, executives who received a strengths-based coaching program were compared with a group waiting to receive coaching, and changes in leadership were measured with multisource ratings of full-range leadership behavior, including ratings by the leaders' own staff. The coached group showed greater gains in transformational leadership than the comparison group. Because the gains were seen by others, not only reported by the coachees, this study comes closer than most to showing that coaching changes how leaders actually behave. Its sample was small and drawn from corporate executives, far from a rural health center, but its design addresses the weakness of self-report. The program also built on each executive's existing strengths rather than working only on weaknesses, which suggests a starting point for leads who were promoted because they were good at their earlier jobs.

What Makes Coaching Work

De Haan et al. (2016) studied 1,895 coach and client pairs across many countries to see which factors predicted coaching outcomes. The quality of the working relationship between coach and client was the strongest predictor of how effective clients judged their coaching to be, while matching coach and client personalities added little, and clients' self-efficacy also played a part. The outcome was rated by clients, so the study shares the self-report limitation, but its size makes its central finding hard to dismiss: the relationship matters more than the technique. For a supervisor-coach, that finding cuts both ways: an existing relationship can be a head start, or, if trust is thin, a handicap no technique will overcome.

What the Meta-Analyses Add

The meta-analyses discussed in Module 2 point the same way. Jones et al. (2016) found positive effects of workplace coaching on skill-based, affective and individual-level results, and stronger effects when coaches were internal to the organization. Combined with the relationship finding, this suggests that an internal coach who already knows the coachee's world, and who builds a trusting relationship, may be well placed to help, provided the power difference does not undermine trust.

Gaps in the Evidence

Three gaps limit what I can conclude. First, almost no research examines coaching in safety-net health care, where leads supervise staff under heavy patient loads and thin budgets. Second, few studies measure outcomes that matter to a health center, such as staff turnover, patient wait times or care coordination completion. Third, most coaching in the research is delivered by trained coaches, while I have no coaching credentials. The evidence supports coaching in general; it does not guarantee that my coaching will help these leads. A fourth gap concerns follow-up: most studies measure outcomes at the end of coaching, so it is unclear how long the gains last once the sessions stop.

Is It Worth the Time?

For a health center with no coaching budget, the real cost of coaching is my time: five leads, a 45-minute session every two weeks, adds up to about nine hours a month, or roughly a tenth of my working hours. The alternative uses of that time are not trivial; I could spend it on payer contracts or grant reports that bring money into the center. The case for coaching rests partly on turnover. Last year the front desk and medical assistant teams together lost 14 employees, and the center's own estimate puts the cost of recruiting and training each replacement at about $4,000, so turnover on those two teams alone cost more than $50,000. If coaching helps the leads reduce that loss even modestly, through clearer structure for new hires and better delegation, it would repay the hours many times over. That calculation rests on an assumption the evidence cannot yet confirm, which is why tracking turnover is part of the plan below.

Implications for Coaching the Five Leads

Four implications follow. First, invest in the relationship before the technique: the first coaching sessions with each lead will focus on building trust and agreeing what coaching is and is not, in line with the finding that the working relationship predicts outcomes. Second, measure behavior through others, not only through the leads' own reports: I will ask each lead's team two short questions about the lead's leadership at the start and after six months, borrowing the logic of multisource ratings. Third, use strengths as well as problems: the strengths-based approach in the controlled study suggests starting from what each lead already does well. Fourth, track one organizational outcome per team, such as turnover on the front desk team or completed referrals for care coordination, to address the gap the systematic review identified.

Conclusion

The evidence supports coaching as a way to develop leaders, most strongly for outcomes the coachee reports and, in at least one controlled study, for leadership behavior that others can see. It also points to the relationship as the active ingredient. For a small health center with no coaching budget, that is encouraging: the most important condition for effective coaching is one I can work to create, while the evidence gaps are a reason to measure carefully rather than to assume success.

References

Athanasopoulou, A., & Dopson, S. (2018). A systematic review of executive coaching outcomes: Is it the journey or the destination that matters the most? The Leadership Quarterly, 29(1), 70-88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.11.004

de Haan, E., Grant, A. M., Burger, Y., & Eriksson, P.-O. (2016). A large-scale study of executive and workplace coaching: The relative contributions of relationship, personality match, and self-efficacy. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 68(3), 189-207. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000058

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. F. (2016). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 249-277. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12119

MacKie, D. (2014). The effectiveness of strength-based executive coaching in enhancing full range leadership development: A controlled study. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 66(2), 118-137. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000005