The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

The popularity of coaching as a development activity in organizations has outpaced the research. To inspire research and strengthen our intellectual foundation, the Thought Leadership Institute of the International Coaching Federation invited 35 of the most recognized coaching scholars and 12 coaching leaders to three two-hour discussions. Each session began with three presenters briefly sharing observations about what we know and need to find out. The three sessions focused on: (1) the desired outcomes of coaching; (2) the process and mechanism of coaching; and (3) coaching for people from distinctive cultures, genders, and context. A fourth theme emerged as the major gap in the research about the competencies of effective coaches. This paper summarizes the discussions. Twenty-two specific research needs for the coming years are identified and presented, clustered within the four themes. This should provide guidance for graduate students, faculty and consultants considering research on coaching.

Organizational crises, especially those of an extreme nature that include threats to survival and mass casualties, are deeply psychologically challenging for leaders. Previous research has focused on the effectiveness of leaders’ crisis management without much consideration for how leaders manage their own crisis reactions. This study was carried out in the crisis management facilities at the headquarters of a multinational energy corporation while a terrorist attack was ongoing in one of its subsidiaries. The unique access and data provide insights into how leaders react to crises and seek support by using different coping strategies. We develop a three-phase model (acceptance, psychological flexibility, and commitment) that illustrates the in-situ creation of a holding environment to support leaders in coping, not choking, under the pressure of a life-threatening crisis.

Chief executive officers (CEOs) have a substantial influence on the decision-making processes of the top management team (TMT) and the performance of the firm in general, and this influence is particularly important in small-sized family firms. By integrating research on CEO qualities and the CEO–TMT interface to explain how they interact in ways that drive firm performance, we provide a first attempt to highlight the importance of CEO capacity to implement decisions that were made following a comprehensive process (i.e., strategic decision comprehensiveness, SDC) for the performance of small-sized family firms. In so doing, we provide a micro-foundation lens and also direct research attention to decision implementation, a key issue in the field of strategic management, which unfortunately has relatively been overlooked in the extant literature. Results of multisource survey data collected from CEOs and TMT members of 131 small-sized family firms indicate a positive interaction effect between CEO implementation capacity, the TMT SDC, and the performance of small-sized family firms.

Organizational teams operate in increasingly volatile environments in which the speed and degree of change accelerates, demanding rapid adaptation processes namely of the improvisational type. It is therefore essential to understand how to prepare teams to operate in such contexts. This work investigates the effects of team mental model similarity, in-action reflexivity, and transitional reflexivity on team-improvised adaptation performance and on team-improvised adaptation learning. Two experiments were conducted with a total of 121 teams. We manipulated the independent variables and used an overtime design to measure team-improvised adaptation learning. Our findings suggest that teams operating in unpredictable environments that require rapid adaptation should be able to reflect collectively, both while acting and between tasks. These teams should also develop a common understanding of the main elements of the context and the task, so that they are effective in the face of unpredictability and rapid change.

Management scholars have long been interested in the topic of authenticity in the workplace, evidenced by the history of scholarship on authentic leadership and the many new authenticity constructs that have emerged. In this article, we take a narrower view of authenticity and focus on relational authenticity in the workplace, which we define as being genuine in workplace relationships. Adapting a validated relational authenticity scale to the organizational context, we explore the ways in which feeling authentic in workplace relationships has ramifications for discretionary behaviors. Specifically, we build on belongingness theory to posit that relational authenticity will result in an increase in engagement in both altruistic and sportsmanship behaviors. We also explore the moderating effect of proactive personality on these relationships. Results from our two-sample study (N = 352; 500) indicate that relational authenticity is positively associated with engagement in both altruistic and sportsmanship behaviors.

The author, a native Chinese practitioner, presents the Five Maxims for OD consulting in China grounded in Taoist and Confucian wisdom based on her experiences working with multinational corporations.

There is increasing interest in organizational scholarship in the role of place. To support these developments, we offer a framework for place-sensitive research in organizational analysis. The notion of place refers to a unique location, endowed with a material from and a socially constructed set of meanings. In line with the phenomenology of place, our framework first distinguishes between two ontologies of place: place as experience—through which people develop a sense of place—and place as practice—through which people engage collectively to make places. Second, our framework distinguishes between three temporal orientations in relation to place: past, present, and future. We then draw from research in geography to reflect on two under-explored methodological toolkits to collect data on and analyze place as experience and place as practice in organization studies: walking interviews, and geographical videography.