The role of executive coaching in enabling social capital amongst female senior managers in Corporate Investment Banking

Abstract

Organisations across the globe are looking to improve their diversity and inclusion efforts. This is in recognition that, despite many efforts such as designing women leadership development programmes to aid the advancement of women, women remain underrepresented n the corporate pipeline. It is thus of great importance to embark on a study to investigate the role that leadership development interventions such as coaching can play in enabling women to make use of social capital. Qualitative data was collected by means of interviews with senior female managers that have participated in a women’s leadership development programme that incorporated coaching and that appreciates concepts such as social capital. Patterns of meaning were identified using athematic analysis method. The findings showed that women’s preferences and values and their abilities and behaviours limited their career advancement. Other variables emerged as contributors to the lack of or the slow advancement of women. It was only after they had attended a leadership programme that included coaching to implement the learnings, that they started to adopt behaviours associated with social capital. The study recommends that, in order to facilitate the coaching experience and outcomes pertaining to career advancement, coaches need to understand the competencies that women need to adopt to make use of social capital. Further, human resources practitioners can make use of the findings to design leadership development programmes differently. The conclusion drawn from the study is that coaching as a leadership development intervention can enable the use of social capital and make a contribution to the career advancement of women particularly at senior management level