The Limitations of Coaching

Abstract

Organizational practices and discourses are prone to suppressing voices that raise doubts about the validity of their taken-for-granted beliefs and ideologies. John O. Ogbor asserts that organizations are socially constructed ideologies that, ‘legitimize the power relations of managerial élites within an organization and society at large’.¹ It could be argued that organizations seen from a postmodernist perspective may be perceived as institutions which suppress conflicting interests and thereby fuel corporate hegemony. A postmodernist epistemology encourages different perspectives which may therefore offer new possibilities. The same would be true of a critical approach to coaching and its ability to offer a challenge to the entrenched worldviews of the individual or organization. A perceived weakness not of coaching, but of the recipients of coaching such as leaders and organizations, is their unwillingness to engage in a critical analysis of personal values, group norms, ideologies, and associated behaviour. This scepticism is borne out by Vega Zagier Roberts and Michael Jarrett in a discussion as to how clients select coaches and how irrational the process may be at times: