| Employee coaching, which we consider to be a critical part of the performance management process, is coaching done by a manager or supervisor with his or her direct reports. The current paper seeks to further our understanding of employee coaching in several ways. First and foremost, the current paper addresses the absence of a solid definition of employee coaching by drawing on existing definitions and conceptualizations of employee coaching to establish a new, all-encompassing definition. The paper also focuses specifically on the importance of the supervisor-subordinate coaching relationship as a foundation for effective employee coaching. A definition of the employee coaching relationship is presented. A new measure of the Perceived Quality of the Coaching Relationship (PQCR) is developed in the pilot study. Finally, several supervisor individual differences and other variables are examined as possible predictors of PQCR in the focal study. The focal study uses a multi-level modeling approach to test 13 hypotheses and other exploratory analyses. Limitations, practical implications, and directions for future research are also discussed. |
