Section 1. Using This Sourcebook

This sourcebook is designed to both provide an introduction to the topic of executive coaching and help guide experienced researchers and practitioners to literature most relevant for their needs. Literature on executive coaching has grown substantially since the annotated bibliography compiled by Douglas and Morley (2000). Due to the growing size and breadth of this literature, rather than simply providing an updated annotated bibliography, this sourcebook strategically compiles key publications as a means to highlight the state of leadership coaching.

This sourcebook can be used in a variety of ways. First, Section 2 provides a brief overview of the past and current state of the executive coaching literature. This material provides a brief synopsis for individuals who have limited or dated knowledge of executive coaching and wish to gain a greater understanding of the major issues in the literature. In addition to this general overview, Section 5 presents a summary of the current literature as well as discussion of the major factors in leadership coaching according to the framework provided in Section 4. We encourage readers to examine Figures 1 and 2 for an overview of the issues and corresponding articles.

For individuals wishing to develop deeper knowledge of a particular topic related to executive coaching, outlines of topic-specific articles are provided in Section 6. Although not intended to replace the original articles, these outlines were designed to help you identify the articles most relevant to your needs. Additionally, each article has been assigned codes to help readers efficiently identify the type of methodology employed, particularly useful introductions of a topic, number of citations included, number of pages, and the type of article (for example, conceptual or empirical). Table 1 provides a list and definitions of the codes, and Table 2 maps each article according to these codes.

Thus, this sourcebook can be read in its entirety to provide a comprehensive overview of current coaching publications, or it can be used to identify resources specific to an individual reader’s needs.

Table 1. Definitions of codes assigned to articles

Table 2. Summary of all articles coded