Despite the fact that executive coaching is a relatively new means of leadership development, interest in executive coaching is strong (Kampa-Kokesch & Anderson, 2001). Executive coaching is an increasingly popular means for developing organizational leaders. This interest is reflected in the rapid growth in the use of executive coaching in organizations, as well as the growth in the popular press including books and articles related to executive coaching (Sherman & Freas, 2004). Although scholarly research on executive coaching is growing, it lags behind practice and is considerably disjointed.
The purpose of this sourcebook is to provide a resource for both practitioners and researchers interested in gaining or updating their understanding of the current state of the executive coaching field and to enable them to do so in a systematic manner. By focusing on key research and practices in the executive coaching literature, this sourcebook provides not only a mechanism for consolidating our thinking about leadership coaching issues but also a succinct reference for building future research efforts. As such, this sourcebook will be a useful means for facilitating evidence-based management practices in the application of executive coaching. Researchers and practitioners who are new to executive coaching will find this a helpful introduction to the field, and those with more experience will find a useful reference and quick update of emerging trends in current research and practice.
This sourcebook is divided into seven sections. The first section describes how to use the sourcebook to fit your individual needs. A brief definition and historical overview of executive coaching is provided in Section 2, followed by an overview of the Leadership Coaching Framework used to organize the articles presented in Section 3. Section 4 describes how articles were selected for inclusion in the sourcebook. Section 5 summarizes emerging themes from each category of articles considered as well as future directions. Section 6 includes the outline for each article included in the sourcebook and highlights the purpose(s), methodology, and implications for each article. Finally, in Section 7 we compiled a list of additional resources that we and our colleagues have found useful; although this is not comprehensive, particularly as the field of executive coaching continues to grow, we felt a singular consolidated listing would be a useful resource for our readers.