308 ■ III: ROLE FUNCTIONS OF DOCTORAL ADVANCED NURSING PRACTICE
has gone from fad to fundamental,” yet it is important to note that establishing empiri-
cally based research on its efficacy remains a challenge (Frankovelgia, 2010).
Although anecdotal evidence (Smith Glasgow, Weinstock, Lachman, Suplee, &
Dreher, 2009; Weinstock & Sanaghan, 2015) plus a slowly emerging body of research
support the value of coaching with successful outcomes (Kombarakaran, Yang, Baker, &
Fernandes, 2008), questions remain about how to measure success, how to account for
the subjective nature of individually reported success, whether or not external observ-
ers make the best raters of post-coaching change, and how to identify the contextual ele-
ments that contribute to beneficial coaching outcomes. A Harvard Business Review arti-
cle reported that, “The coaching field is filled with contradictions. Coaches themselves
disagree over why they’re hired, what they do, and how to measure success” (Coutu &
Kauffman, 2009). Researcher Graham Hill reported that, “the widespread popularity of
executive coaching has been based largely on anecdotal feedback regarding its effective-
ness. The small body of empirical research has been growing but conclusive outcomes
are rare” (Hill, 2010, p. ii).
In 2009, the Institute of Coaching was established at Harvard’s McLean Hospital
to house and support rigorous research on coaching. Its mission involves the intent to
establish the validity and acceptance of the coaching profession by setting rigorous cri-
teria for both research on coaching outcomes and coaching practice standards. It awards
large research grants and has begun to amass a reservoir of white papers, doctoral dis-
sertations, peer-reviewed journal articles on coaching research and bibliographies of
coaching-research journal abstracts. Its current director, Carol Kauffman, has been com-
mitted to updating research as far back as 2004 and said then that “to withstand the scru-
tiny of a wider public, the field needs to be able to explicitly describe what principles
inform interventions, suggest theories that explain why they work and to support...
the foundation of solid empirical research.... We need to broaden our personal expe-
rience to include more rigorous study and analysis of what works with whom, when,
where, and how” (Kauffman, 2004, p. 2).
An increasing amount of empirical evidence on the coaching outcomes is begin-
ning to accumulate. In 2009, the Korn Ferry Institute conducted a rigorous research
venture involving a meta-analysis of 23 research studies designed to evaluate the
effectiveness of executive coaching. They concluded that in retrospective accounts,
executives reported beneficial outcomes and their research summary stated that,
“clearly, we can conclude that coaching works in most cases” (Dai & De Meuse, 2009,
p. 14).
In a 2011 article “A Critical Review of Executive Coaching Research: A Decade of
Progress and What’s to Come,” the author stated that, “we are seeing a shift from case
study and uncontrolled trials to designs appropriate to the type of research questions
prompted by theory generation.... By 2021, we hope that ‘researchers across the globe
will have completed fifty to hundred large sample size studies’ that will contribute to
the field” (Fillery-Travis & Passmore, 2011, p. 10).
We concur that more research is needed to establish when and where executive
coaching is worth its time, attention, and resources. The good news is that there are
increasing numbers of researchers and practitioners who are passionate about address-
ing professional standards for coaching and collecting empirical data on successful out-
comes. The International Coaching Federation, The International Journal of Evidence-Based
Coaching and Mentoring , and the ongoing work from Harvard’s Institute of Coaching
will provide valuable contributions to the professionalization of the coaching field. We
are therefore encouraged by the slow, but increasing number of researchers who are
contributing to a growing body of literature on coaching efficacy.