Coaching Practiced

Section 5 Workplace Coaching Introduction

David Tee & Jonathan Passmore

Coaching psychology, as with psychology in general, lacks a grand unifying theory. Similarly, there is no consistently used or defined set of terms and, occasionally, it seems there is an assumed understanding as to the meaning of particular phrases or labels. ‘Workplace coaching’ may be such an example. In our introduction to Section 4, we were able to share various definitions of ‘health coaching’. It may be that coaching within an organisational context dominates the research and practice fields to such an extent that writers do not feel a need to define workplace coaching in the same way they do health coaching, educational coaching or other context-specified fields.

An opportunistic glance in the index of coaching and coaching psychology textbooks either finds the term ‘workplace’ absent or followed by the phrase ‘See also’, with pointers to executive coaching, leadership coaching and other terms that include anything related to organisational life. It is this extant, broader conceptualising of the term that we used in determining papers to include in this section. This is not to suggest that we do not recognise the diversity of organisational settings in which a coach may work. To offer one example, are the considerations of coaches working with C-level executives in multinational organisations (Wasylyshyn, 2020) the same as those working with the bosses of small family owned businesses (Shams & Lane, ...