How your coaching style affects employee attitudes toward learning

A leader’s coaching style can have a significant impact on their employees’ attitudes toward learning, according to recent research on employee behavior.

The research, conducted by business professors at two Chinese universities, focused on two particular coaching styles, which they termed “encourage to explore” and “guide to learn.”

With the former, a leader expects and urges employees to engage in exploration and discovery of topics relevant to their work, largely on their own. The latter is more prescriptive and involves mainly systematic and pre-planned learning activities.

Explore vs. guide

For their research, the professors did two experiments, one involving a group of 60 management students at Chinese universities, and the other 334 pairs of employees and supervisors at a state-owned company.

In the first experiment, the researchers gave one group of participants a scenario involving an encourage-to-explore leader and the other group a guide-to-learn leader. They then asked participants to answer half-a-dozen questions about their attitudes toward learning, using a seven-point scale.

The result: Participants who had been exposed to the “explore” leader expressed a stronger positive learning orientation than those who’d had the “guide” leader.

In the second experiment, the researchers had the employees and their direct supervisors fill out questionnaires rating the supervisors’ behaviors in terms of “explore” or “guide.” The employees also rated their own learning orientation, and the resulting data showed a strong correlation between a positive attitude toward learning and “explore” behavior by the leader.

Interestingly, “guide” behavior by the leader also produced a positive attitude — but only up to a point. When leaders were perceived as highly prescriptive about learning, some of the employees’ attitudes toward learning deteriorated.

Growth vs. protection

In both experiments, the researchers also tested a separate set of attributes. This involved the employees’ personal psychological orientation — whether each person was more interested in growing their capacities or, by contrast, in protecting their position by knowing and doing their duty.

These characteristics interacted meaningfully with the leader styles, the researchers found.

Specifically, there was a match between the “explore” leadership style and the “growth” employees, and between the “guide” leadership style and the “protect” employees. The most positive learning attitudes occurred when leader practice reflected the underlying orientation of the person.

The interplay

What’s all this mean for a leader? Well, obviously you can’t tailor your approach toward employee learning to each individual employee. You can’t be a complete “explore” leader with one person and a 100% “guide” with another.

But what you can do is be aware of the interplay of the two styles, and try to use both approaches as you plan and execute learning activities to help your people gain new knowledge and skills.

This blog entry is based on the following research article: Liu, W. & Xiang, S. (2020).  The Effect of Leaders’ Coaching Behaviors on Employee Learning Orientation: A Regulatory Focus Perspective. Front. Psychol. 11:543282.