Managerial coaching of frontline employees: The moderating role of gender

• Author: Claudio Pousa,David A. Richards,Carole Trépanier
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21322

QUANTITATIVE STUDY

Managerial coaching of frontline employees:

The moderating role of gender

Claudio Pousa

1

| David A. Richards

1

| Carole Trépanier

2

1

Faculty of Business Administration, Lakehead

University, Thunder Bay, Canada

2

Training and Coaching, Addendum, Quebec,

Canada

Correspondence

Dr. Claudio Pousa, DBA, Lakehead University,

Faculty of Business Administration, Thunder

Bay, Canada.

Email: cepousa@lakeheadu.ca

Managerial coaching (also known as the leader-as-coach model) is

becoming prevalent as a new management paradigm to develop

and empower employees and help them increase their perfor-

mance. At the same time, the composition of the workforce has

changed, with female employees reaching almost 50% of workers

and around 30% of managers. Accordingly, scholars have set out to

understand if gender affects managerial behaviors and employee

responses. The goal of this study is to evaluate if significant differ-

ences in performance should be expected when coaching female

and male employees. The results suggest that female and male

responses to managerial coaching are more complex than expected.

Managerial coaching positively affects female behavioral and result

performance and male behavioral performance, but—contrary to

expectations—no significant effect was found for coaching on male

result performance. Additionally, female and male employees differ

in their self-evaluation of the focal performance constructs, with

females evaluating their contribution to performance at lower

levels than their male counterparts. The results suggest that, to be

an effective developmental tool, the approach taken with coaching

should take into consideration the recipient's gender and address

different areas of performance.

KEYWORDS

gender, leader-as-coach model, managerial coaching,

performance management, role congruity theory, social exchange

theory

1|INTRODUCTION

The new millennium has seen acceleration in the pace of the environmental change that affects organizations, which

is characterized by a more complex work environment, the need for more collaboration with customers and other

people in the organization, and increasing levels of accountability to customers for a better service (Ingram, LaForge,

DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21322

Human Resource Development Quarterly. 2018;29:219–241. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrdq © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 219

Locander, MacKenzie, & Podsakoff, 2005). Customer expectations are on the rise and they are expecting more

knowledgeable frontline-service employees who can respond faster to their demands, communicate better, and pro-

vide them with customized service offerings (E. Jones, Brown, Zoltners, & Weitz, 2005).

As the demand for more responsive, committed, and empowered employees rises, the demand on managers to

be more effective also increases. Being an effective manager goes beyond supervising employees, because managers

have to be “strategy-driven leaders capable of influencing others to achieve ambitious goals and objectives [and]

relying on the authority of his or her position to exert influence is an increasingly questionable practice except in

short-run crisis situations”(Ingram, LaForge, & Leigh, 2002, p. 561). Managerial coaching provides a milieu where

supervisors develop human capital within their existing workforce. It has been identified as a key indicator of effec-

tive management and the preferred managerial behavior to exert an influence on the employees without relying on

formal authority (A. D. Ellinger, Hamlin, & Beattie, 2008; Hamlin, Ellinger, & Beattie, 2006).

The number of studies on managerial coaching (also known as the leader-as-coach model) has steeply increased

in the last 10 years (Grant, 2011). Although some scholars claim there is a lack of empirical evidence linking manage-

rial coaching to organization and employee performance (Beattie et al., 2014; M. S. Hagen, 2012), some have found

evidence that managerial coaching has a positive influence on employee performance (Agarwal, Angst, & Magni,

2009; A. D. Ellinger, Ellinger, & Keller, 2003; Pousa & Mathieu, 2014b; Trépanier, 2010). Other researchers have

identified mediators to explain how coaching is linked to performance (Kim, 2014; Onyemah, 2009; Pousa &

Mathieu, 2014a, 2015). Despite these contributions, there are still some significant gaps in the literature, notably lon-

gitudinal studies inferring causal relationships, cross-cultural research with non-Western populations, and moderation

analysis examining interactions of contextual or demographic variables and coaching (Beattie et al., 2014; Ye, Wang,

Hein Wendt, Wu, & Euwema, 2016).

This last gap, specifically the interaction between gender and coaching, is particularly relevant in the current

job market, where female employees represent an important part of the workforce. In Canada in 2014, 82% of

womenwereemployedcomparedwith91%ofCanadianmen, whereby women made up almost half (47%) of the

Canadian workforce (Statistics Canada, 2017). Although only 37% of general managerial positions are occupied

by women in Canada, women represent a majority of workers in certain occupations like Business and Finance

(51.2%) or Sales and Services (56.9%), along with fields such as health care (87.1%) and clerical and administrative

(75.5%) where women have traditionally worked in higher numbers (Ferrao, 2017). These changes in the composi-

tion of the workforce have led to a growing stream of research about women in management, to understand how

gender affects managerial behaviors as well as employee responses to these. In the particular case of managerial

coaching, Anderson (2013) found “… a small association between core managerial coaching and gender …”

(p. 260). However, another study found that female managers engage more in coaching behaviors compared to

male managers because managerial coaching might be more aligned with expected female leadership roles devel-

oped by early socialization (Ye et al., 2016). Although it is important to understand the interaction between

coaching and gender from a managerial perspective, one important gap is also whether different results should be

expected when a manager provides coaching to male versus female employees. Research has not provided an

answer to this question yet, and evidence from the related field of mentoring is contradictory. Given that the

number of female employees is considerably higher than the number of female managers, this is also an important

gap to be studied.

Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to test the moderating effect of employee gender on coaching out-

comes, namely, employee performance. We chose performance as an outcome for two reasons. First, given the

increased pressure in organizational settings to achieve organizational effectiveness and performance, it is useful to

assess individual performance of frontline employees given its direct contribution to organizational performance.

And second, because previous research has already found initial support for the positive influence of coaching on

individual performance, we wanted to use an accepted model (for which we should normally find support) to test the

moderation effect.

220 POUSA ET AL.