Section 4. Article Selection Criteria
As the purpose of the sourcebook is to provide an overview of the state of the executive coaching literature as well as guide readers to specific exemplar articles, we determined three necessary steps for identifying and selecting articles. First, relevant databases were identified. Second, the parameters for identifying relevant articles were defined. And third, the articles were reviewed and selected for inclusion in the sourcebook.
Various databases were used to identify relevant sources, including Psych-INFO, ABI-Inform, and Google Scholar. Executive coaching and leadership coaching were included as search terms, in combination with specific terms from the Leadership Coaching Framework, to identify articles for each specific component of the model. We also examined coaching-specific journals, which are not in the traditional databases.
When we were selecting articles from these publications to be reviewed as well as included in the sourcebook, a number of selection criteria were considered. First, priority was given to more recent articles, particularly those published since the annotated bibliography by Douglas and Morley in 2000. Additionally, articles identified as having a high impact on the field, such as being cited in numerous other sources, were prioritized over articles having less of an impact. Third, any review articles that have been published to date were included in order to point readers toward other valuable executive coaching resources. Further, an effort was made to include scholarly research articles as well as high-quality practitioner resources.
Finally, we chose to limit the number of articles to make the sourcebook as manageable and practically useful as possible. Therefore, ten to fifteen articles with a primary focus on each of the six components of the Leadership Coaching Framework—coach and client characteristics, coach-client match, organizational support, coaching process, medium, and coaching outcomes—were selected for inclusion. The articles representing each section of the Leadership Coaching Framework are presented in Figure 2 (p. 18). Some components of the framework contain more publications than others, as more than one topic was often addressed in an article, therefore an article may be listed in multiple locations. A total of eighty-one articles are included in the sourcebook (Section 6).
As the coaching literature becomes more expansive, we acknowledge that some worthwhile publications on executive coaching may not have been identified and therefore that some exemplar articles may not be included in this sourcebook. Further, we did not intend the sourcebook to be a comprehensive reference list of every leadership-coaching-related publication. Instead, articles selected for inclusion highlight and reflect the literature in terms of key topics and their relative contributions. Further, the framework and example articles provide a mechanism to examine future literature.
