Coaching in the HRD Context

Coaching has emerged as a service industry with the growing investments in coaching reaching over 2 billion dollars worldwide and the increasing numbers of self-identified professional coaches at over 47,500 according to the 2012 and 2013 International Coach Federation reports (Egan and Hamlin, 2014). It is anticipated that the demands for coaching will continue to increase along with expectations about its effectiveness as a developmental intervention and the quality associated with its provision (Bennett and Bush, 2009; Grant and Cavanagh, 2004). Coaching has been described as “a human development process that involves structured, focused interaction and the use of appropriate strategies, tools and techniques to promote desirable and sustainable change for the benefit of the coachee and potentially for other stakeholders” (Bachkirova, Cox, and Clutterbuck, 2014, p. 1) Coaching is considered to be a 2 relatively new field of study and an applied field of practice that has gained tremendous popularity and growth in recent years (Cox, Bachkirova and Clutterbuck, 2014; Gray and Goregaokar, 2010).
Bachkirova et al. (2014) acknowledge that coaching has intellectual roots that draw upon many disciplines and that it is used in many different contexts. Human Resource Development (HRD) is one such context. Coaching has been used to develop employees, managers, and leaders within organizations and the use of coaching in organizations has grown substantially suggesting that organizational settings where HRD mainly resides represent an important context to examine.