Managerial coaching skill and team performance: How does the relationship work and under what conditions?

Abstract

Empirical evidence about whether and how managerial coaching relates to team performance continues to lag behind research conducted on individual employee outcomes. We address this question by drawing on social cognition theory and turning the spotlight on the moderating role of managers' learning goal orientation and the mediating role of team-level architectural knowledge. We employ dual-source data from 182 knowledge workers and their managers nested in 60 teams in knowledge-based organisations. Our findings indicate that team-level architectural knowledge mediates the relationship between managerial coaching skill and team performance when the managers' learning goal orientation is high rather than low. Our study contributes to the human resources literature by highlighting the importance of managers in devolved developmental interventions and offers practical implications for the informed workplace use of managerial coaching.