Organizational Environment, Personal Resources and Work Engagement as Predictors of Coaching Performance

We developed and tested a model examining the influence of organizational environment, job demands, personal resources, burnout and work engagement on the coaching performance of coaching professionals. The study proposed that there is a relationship between organizational environment and coaching performance and that personal resources and work engagement mediate the effects of this relationship. The study implies that both the health impairment and motivational processes as described by the JDR-model can be applied to the context of coaching professionals. Because of the strategic importance of human capital in coaching enterprises, it is important for the continuity of the organization that they will provide their practioners with tangible suggestions to improve coaching performance. predictor of coaching performance. The insights into the sub-questions can be synthesized to answer the central research question: “To what extent does the organizational environment influence the performance of coaching professionals and to what extent do burnout, engagement and personal resources influence this relationship? ” The results indicate that the organizational environment has a direct effect on coaching performance and that burnout, engagement and job resources mediate this effect. Personal resources are the strongest predictor of coaching performance in this study. This leads to the central conclusions that the organizational environment in terms of job demands and resources can directly stimulate and hinder the performance of coaches, depending on how each of the factors in the organizational environment is viewed by the coach. The second and final conclusion is that burnout, engagement and personal resources mediate the direct effects of job demands and resources on coaching performance. The focus therefore lies on optimizing the organizational environment to benefit coaching performance. Several biases that come with self-reported data are known to lead to measurement errors (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee & Podsakoff, 2003). Common biases that potentially play a role in this study are the desire for respondents to answer consistently; the respondents can feel that they are expected to provide certain answers instead of their true answers. Respondents can hold implicit theories towards the measured concepts that can affect the way respondents complete the questionnaire. Social desirability bias can play a role; respondents might skew their answers towards what would in their eyes to be culturally acceptable and appropriate. The conditions under which the respondents complete the questionnaire is not controlled for, therefore the level of concentration or the amount of distractions while completing the questionnaire could vary per respondent. Selection bias might play a role. The respondents work or have worked for a company that is or has been certified by the certification institute that provided the contact details. This means that this study involved respondents that are associated with companies that care or have cared about being certified on the quality of their services. This type of company might attract specific type of coaching professional. Another factor is the truthfulness of the respondents. The assumption is made that all respondents have completed this questionnaire truthfully as there are no way to truly control this with an online questionnaire. One important observation in the data is that response numbers dropped somewhat when items with “coach”