A systematic review of coaching client characteristics

Abstract

With increasing evidence about the effectiveness of workplace and executive coaching as an organisational development intervention, research has turned to the components that may predict coaching outcome variance. The ‘common factors’ model from therapeutic outcome research suggests that ‘client and extratherapeutic factors’ is the single greatest contributing variable. This systematic review determines all statistically significant client factor variables from the peer-reviewed coaching research literature, with 17 distinct factors from quantitative studies and 22 factors from qualitative studies. It is hoped that the three most frequently identified client factors (‘willingness or motivation to change, ‘commitment to the relationship/process’ and ‘openness’) may be used as predictor variables in future research to bring focus to what has been a disparate field of study to date. Keywords: Coaching psychology; Common factors; Client factors; Coachability.