Abstract

The main purpose of the present study was to implement an experiment to explore the effects from coaching
based leadership on goal setting, self-efficacy, and causal attribution. The study comprised of 20 executives and
124 middle managers at a branch of a Norwegian Fortune 500 company who all voluntarily participated in an
experiment over a period of one year. The executives who were randomly chosen for the experiment group
conducted a coach specific training programme over one year and executed coaching based leadership with the
middle managers in the experiment group.
The study uses ANCOVA to explore possible effects from coaching based leadership on psychological variables
that have an impact on performance. The ANCOVA analyses from this study supported none out of three
proposed hypotheses. Only one significant change in the experiment group was found, as successful attributions
to ability increased. This study raises important questions about coaching based leadership. The results are
mainly discussed related to possible conflicting roles in coaching based leadership and possible lack of
competencies among the executives to efficiently fulfil their roles as coaches.
Coaching in business is a fast growing industry and this study is a contribution to expand the amount of
empirical studies with an experiment- and control group design that explore the effects from coaching based
leadership.

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