DBAX 9102 Week 3 Literature Claim Sort Example

Sorting the Coaching Literature by What It Claims, Not What It Is About: Regrouping Thirty-Seven Studies Into Five Claims, Each With the Conditions Under Which It Was Observed and How Strongly It Is Supported

Student Name

Walden University

DBAX 9102: Business Research Project Stage 2

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Sorting the Coaching Literature by What It Claims, Not What It Is About: Regrouping Thirty-Seven Studies Into Five Claims, Each With the Conditions Under Which It Was Observed and How Strongly It Is Supported

Why Sort by Claim

A literature sorted by subject heading looks organized while hiding what it actually claims. Under headings such as "coaching and performance" or "coaching in sales," studies that make very different claims sit side by side, and studies that make the same claim are scattered. For a study of how branch managers' coaching bears on whether their sellers hit quota, what matters is which claims the literature makes, under what conditions and how well each is supported. This paper regroups the 37 studies from my search into five claims.

The Five Claims

Table 1

The Coaching Literature Sorted by Claim

Counts sum to more than 37 where a study makes more than one claim. Support judged by number of studies, design and outcome source.

What the Sort Reveals

The first claim is the best supported, but it is not the claim my study needs. Theeboom et al. (2014) and Jones et al. (2016) both found positive average effects of coaching, yet most coaching in their samples was delivered by trained professionals, often to managers rather than frontline staff. Under a subject heading, these meta-analyses look like strong support for managerial coaching. Sorted by claim, they support a related but different proposition.

The second claim, that managers' coaching relates to their employees' performance, is the one closest to my question. Ellinger et al. (2003), studying warehouse supervisors and their employees in the distribution industry, found that supervisors' coaching behavior was associated with employees' job satisfaction and performance. Most studies under this claim, however, used ratings rather than records for performance. Only four used sales or productivity figures from company systems.

The third claim is small but sharp. Dahling et al. (2016) linked managers' coaching skill to salespeople's goal attainment in a large sales organization and found that the value of coaching frequency depended on that skill. This is the claim most directly relevant to a sales plan that prescribes two sessions a month.

The fourth claim draws on goal-setting theory. Locke and Latham (2002) summarized decades of evidence that specific, difficult goals with feedback raise performance, and several coaching studies treat goal setting as the mechanism. The link is plausible, but few studies measure it directly.

What the Sort Does Not Settle

The sort shows where support is strong and where it is thin, but not why studies disagree, which next week's analysis takes up. It also depends on my judgments of each study's claim; two studies could reasonably be placed under different claims. I have flagged six such cases in the extraction sheet.

What It Means for My Study

My study belongs under the second and third claims: coaching by a direct manager, measured both by frequency and by quality, with an outcome from company records. The sort shows that this combination is rare. That rarity is the beginning of the gap my study will address, though the gap statement itself waits for Week 6.

A Claim the Literature Does Not Make

One claim my company's sales plan assumes is absent from the literature altogether: that a fixed number of coaching sessions per month produces better results than coaching when a salesperson needs it. No study in my set compared scheduled coaching with coaching on demand. The plan's frequency target therefore rests on managerial judgment, not on evidence, which is worth knowing before the study is designed around it.

How the Sort Was Checked

A classmate sorted ten studies without seeing my table and agreed on eight. Both disagreements involved studies that measured coaching quality and frequency together in one scale. I placed them under the second claim, since their design cannot separate the two, and noted the alternative.

References

Dahling, J. J., Taylor, S. R., Chau, S. L., & Dwight, S. A. (2016). Does coaching matter? A multilevel model linking managerial coaching skill and frequency to sales goal attainment. Personnel Psychology, 69(4), 863-894. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12123

Ellinger, A. D., Ellinger, A. E., & Keller, S. B. (2003). Supervisory coaching behavior, employee satisfaction, and warehouse employee performance: A dyadic perspective in the distribution industry. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 14(4), 435-458. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.1078

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. F. (2016). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 249-277. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12119

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.837499