A study of the Corporate Coaching Culture Cultivation approach in meeting change management needs for organisations in China

In the past forty years of economic development, China has grown to become the second-largest economy in the world. To sustain this position, it has encouraged investment in industrial infrastructure and technology, requiring organisations to continuously adapt and transform. Cultivating a coaching culture is an effective solution to meeting their change management needs in talent agility, but there is only limited academic research on cultivating a coaching culture in China. With the increasing demand and a corresponding need for a more theoretical framework for effective implementation of a coaching culture, the Corporate Coaching Culture Cultivation (CCCC) approach developed by the researcher, based on her extensive experience in China, is studied in this project to determine how best to foster a coaching culture in this country.
With the literature review providing rich information on a coaching culture and related areas, the original CCCC approach has been revised, gaining an enhanced theoretical framework to include factors like organisational development, types of organisational change, organisational culture, national culture and stage of coaching culture development that impact on the systemic cultivation of a coaching culture. The research is a qualitative multiple case-study, informed by my pragmatic work-based research philosophy. Thirty-eight questionnaires and 10 in-depth semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from four executives from two Private Domestic Enterprises, four executives from two Multinational Corporations and two experienced corporate coaches.
The within-case and cross-case thematic analysis of the data from the four corporate cases reveals that the type of corporate ownership affects the speed and rhythm of nurturing a coaching culture in these organisations. Informed by the research, the CCCC approach with its enhanced theoretical framework has evolved further, with a classification of the significance of success factors, a more customer-focused sequence of implementation steps, a paradoxical paradigm for cross-cultural challenges and a set of newly developed checklists for diagnosis and assessment. The revised approach is intended to provide a structured, fit-for-purpose and adaptive framework, as well as a roadmap to guide organisations and their coaching consultants to co-create a coaching culture to cultivate agile leaders in China.