Workplace coaching: testing whether personality traits and their ABCD components predict authentic self-development via affect balance

What is it about?

Shooting to schore in coaching: Are we missing the goal? At its core, coaching is a goal-directed change intervention. The over-arching goal is to narrow the gap between clients’ current situations and their desired end states. Therefore, we know coaching has been successful when clients have reached their goals. This global understanding is based primarily on outcome research that focuses on linear explorations, as well as explanations of goal attainment with only two measurement points: one at the outset of coaching and one upon completion of the coaching engagement. With our longitudinal quantitative process study involving multiple measurement points we provide a more complex approach to further understand is: a) To what extent are goals self-directed rather than ‘should’ goals. Or in other words, are the goals self-concordant and in alignment with clients’ true personality. b) The mechanisms by which clients attain self-directed goals during the coaching process. In doing so, we explore clients’ authentic self-development as the over-arching goal of the coaching enterprise. Authentic self- development is important, as it expresses how well we actualise our sense of self, without which we fail to meet our three basic human needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness as expressed forms of self- determination (Deci & Ryan, 1985). In coaching, the result is that clients experience a relapse once the coaching engagement is over. We see this phenomenon unfold in other areas of life as well—earning multiple academic degrees or top salaries or finding fame and fortune through significant achievements often leave individuals with a sense of yearning for more or a sense of void. Therefore, our study explored how clients’ personalities (based on the Big Five personality model) predicted their capacity to attain goals that are aligned with their intrinsic interests, needs, values and motivations. We also explored how clients’ capacity to regulate positive and negative affect (i.e., mood) influenced the relationship between personality and authentic self development from session to session and beyond the full coaching engagement.

Featured Image