Leadership Talk by Natalia Fey

Exploring the key success factors in intercultural leadership coaching: The emergence of a relational view on cultural intelligence.

Despite coaching has emerged as a mainstream HR development practice in organizations, research on coaching for leadership development is lagging behind and largely focuses on the traditional form of coaching for leadership development - executive coaching, and mainly in traditional hierarchical business organizations. Against this background, this pioneering two-wave global online study of 107 intercultural leadership coaching dyads, together representing 74 nationalities, explores the key success factors of intercultural leadership coaching. The study is carried out in the much under-researched context of international development organizations, that has increased in importance in Norway and globally.

More specifically, this research seeks to understand the joint impact of the coach and coachee’s cultural intelligence (CQ) components and coaching relationships on coachee learning. The study uses the innovative Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) method, grounded in configurational logic, which enables more complex modeling and is among the first studies in the coaching field applying QCA. This work extends the theoretical landscape of coaching for leadership development by applying the social exchange theory in intercultural settings, and it contributes to CQ literature by taking a relational view of CQ in dyads. By studying coaching across leadership levels and cultural borders, this study reveals significant opportunities for more inclusive coaching for leadership development. This Leadership Talk gives a chance to discuss the nuances of carrying out dyadic research, the challenges of collecting a large coaching sample as well as using fsQCA on an individual level of analysis.

What is Leadership Talks?

Leadership Talks is a series of seminars about topics related to leadership, change and sustainability, project management and organizational psychology, hosted by the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at BI Norwegian Business School.