The role of coaching in supporting team leader development and team performance : skippers of a global sailing race as a microcosm of organisational team leadership
Coaching has developed into the fastest growing leadership development practice as organisations shift towards team-based organisational design. Despite the growth in coaching, a lack of clarity exists around developing team leadership. An evidence base is needed to support the development of both the coaching and team leadership development fields. However, the study of team leadership development is complex, as tensions exist in developing conceptual clarity in socially embedded contexts and understanding the temporal dimension of development. Gaps exist between leader and leadership development and between leadership and team coaching in both the sport and organisational contexts. There is also a gap between individual leader development and organisational performance, resulting in scepticism around the contribution of leadership development to organisational sustainability. This exploratory research focused on a novel, real world instrumental case of coaching skippers in the turbulent context of a global sailing race, to offer a microcosm of team leadership development. A multi-level, temporal perspective contributes to understanding the complexity of developing transitioning leaders in socially embedded team contexts. A social constructionist perspective is considered relevant in interpreting the complexity and the findings are presented in thematic networks to illustrate the complexity. Four findings were generated, which describe how coaching supports team leader development and team performance. Firstly, coaching supported team leader development for transitioning leaders by addressing the tension between expectations and experience. Secondly, coaching provided a protected space to make sense of experience. Development occurred across cognitive, affective and behavioural skills dimensions resulting in individual, relational and collective leadership. Thirdly, the experience of being coached contributed to the development of team coaching capability, which supported the emergence of a coaching web and resulted in a coaching culture. Fourthly, by integrating team well-being, development and performance, the coaching aligned individual leader development with team performance. The Performance Development framework encapsulates the findings and offers a conceptual “compass” to guide practitioners and researchers in navigating the complexity of team leadership development to support team performance. More research is required to develop the conceptual framework to further integrate the coaching, leadership development and experiential learning theory.
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