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Although coaching can facilitate employee development and performance, the stark reality is that managers often differ substantially in their inclination to coach their subordinates. To address this issue, we draw from and build upon a body of social psychology research that finds that implicit person theories (IPTs) about the malleability of personal attributes (e.g., personality and ability) affect one's willingness to help others. Specifically, individuals holding an "entity theory" that human attributes are innate and unalterable are disinclined to invest in helping others to develop and improve, relative to individuals who hold the "incremental theory" that personal attributes can be developed. Three studies examined how managers' IPTs influence the extent of their employee coaching. First, a longitudinal field study found that managers' IPTs predicted employee evaluations of their subsequent employee coaching. This finding was replicated in a second field study. Third, an experimental study found that using self-persuasion principles to induce incremental IPTs increased entity theorist managers' willingness to coach a poor performing employee, as well as the quantity and quality of their performance improvement suggestions.
Employee coaching entails managers providing one-on-one feedback and insights aimed at guiding and inspiring improvements in an employee's work performance (London, 2003; Yukl, 2002). Inherent in this definition is that coaching, compared to generic training programs, typically focuses more on employees' specific workplace challenges (Hall, Otazo, & Hollenbeck, 1999). Large organizations are increasingly expecting managers to coach their employees (Latham, Almost, Mann, & Moore, 2005; London, 2003). For example, employee coaching is a key managerial task at McKinsey & Company (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 2002), YUM! Brands, Inc. (Mike & Slocum, 2003), KPMG (Heslin & Latham, 2004), and Motorola (Latham et al., 2005).
Coaching can facilitate learning to master altered job roles, such as following a promotion (Goldsmith, 2000) or in response to organizational change (Hawkins & Pettey, 2000). As coaching is provided on the job and is tailored to the employee being coached, it is less prone to the transfer-of-training issues that typically undermine the utility of most off-site developmental initiatives (cf., Baldwin & Ford, 1988; Tracey, Tannenbaum, & Kavanaugh, 1995). Consistent with this notion, Olivero, Bane, and Kopelman (1997) found that employee coaching increased productivity over and above the effects of a managerial training program. More recently,...