Business coaching: Research and design strategies

Abstract

Business coaching as an approach to leadership development has entered the field as a force to be reckoned with the past ten to fifteen years. It is, however, also slowly growing as an academic discipline despite the fact that it only has a small number of active researchers. The motivation behind this article is to report on and critically assess the qualitative research projects in business coaching research. A framework has been developed to analyse the information on qualitative methods used in social sciences research. Data on qualitative research and design strategies in business coaching was collected following the systematic literature methodology. The data was synthesised according to the following framework: title and abstract, literature reviews, method, findings and discussion. The article critically analyses the available information to give an overview of the research and design strategies that are used in research articles on business coaching. This article may serve as an induction for young or inexperienced researchers and a tool to improve empirical endeavours in business coaching. The article also presents a way business coaching research could establish itself as an independent and rigorous academic discipline.