The Leadership Coaching Sourcebook: A Guide to the Executive Coaching Literature

Section 2. The Past and Current State of Executive Coaching

Executive coaching has witnessed an increase in popularity in both practice and research in the past two decades (Dagley, 2006; Passmore 2007). Although coaching and leader development efforts have been used in organizations for the past half century (Day, 2001; Kampa-Kokesch & Anderson, 2001), the term executive coaching was first coined in the 1980s in order to reduce the punitive stigma associated with coaching. However, practices were still predominantly corrective in nature and aimed at ineffective leaders (Kampa-Kokesch & Anderson, 2001). The practice of executive coaching substantially increased in the early 1990s, as faltering organizations attributed organizational problems ...