Contextual features affecting managers undertaking coaching and its impact on employee performance in competitive and supportive psychological climates

Managerial coaching is an important responsibility of line managers, yet our understanding of the contextual factors influencing its effectiveness remains limited. We propose mutual high-quality relationships between managers and subordinates as an important antecedent to managerial coaching. Drawing upon social exchange, social determination, and substitutes of leadership theories, we theorise that psychological climates can attenuate or substitute for the effects of managerial coaching on job performance. Results obtained using 389 supervisor–subordinate dyads from 31 organisations in Saudi Arabia show that high-quality dyadic Leader member exchange was an important antecedent of managerial coaching, and this in turn leads to employee job performance. We found that the relationship between managerial coaching and employee job performance was weaker in a competitive psychological climate. A supportive psychological climate did not moderate this relationship. Our findings suggest that organisational investments in managerial coaching will have less impact if they are simultaneously implementing a competitive psychological climate.