An integrative model for executive coaching.

Executive coaching has grown in popularity, but in spite of this growth, the use of sophisticated approaches appears limited. This article brings together a series of evidence-based approaches to build an integrated model for executive coaching, which can be described as integrative coaching. This model uses the concept of working at multiple levels with coaches; behavioral, cognitive, and unconscious. It combines these elements into "streams," which the coach works across seamlessly. The model recognizes the central importance of building a coaching partnership and the role of emotional intelligence in this process with a focus on improving performance at work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of a model of the feedback process within executive coaching.

Recent literature concerning executive coaching consistently points out the need for a better conceptual understanding of the process of coaching. The current paper addresses this need with an emphasis on the role of feedback in executive coaching. Several existing models of the coaching process mention feedback as an important element, but none expand on the role and function of feedback in executive coaching relationships. This paper builds on several existing models of executive coaching and integrates London and Smither's (2002) model of the feedback process to create a model of feedback in executive coaching. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The case for eclecticism in executive coaching: Application to challenging assignments.

This article argues that effectively addressing challenging problems in executive coaching requires the use of not one, but several, theoretical models (e.g., psychodynamic, cognitive–behavioral, and systems) and research findings (e.g., social learning theory, attribution theory) developed in the larger discipline of psychology. Through two case studies, this article presents approaches to coaching executives with a history of high achievement who present problems in leadership because of their emotional and behavioral responses toward others and the negative impact they have on retention, effectiveness, productivity, or all three, in the organization. The authors present step-by-step considerations for coaches as they develop a helping relationship and carry out a multifaceted intervention over time. The approach taken here involves interventions addressing the individual’s emotion communication process as well as group-level and organization-level processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Goals, feedback, and self-regulation: Control theory as a natural framework for executive coaching.

The popularity of coaching continues to grow at a rate faster than research can validate coaching practices. Although strong research and theory on coaching have been emerging over the past few years, we believe that this body of literature would benefit from more integration of theory and application of organizing frameworks. The current paper seeks to contribute to the coaching literature by applying a Control Theory (CT) framework to elements of executive coaching. The two core elements of CT—goals and feedback—are also critical components of executive coaching. By applying a CT framework, we hope to provide both structure and new ideas regarding the roles of goals and feedback in executive coaching. We also suggest that one role of executive coaches is to help coaches become more effective self-regulators and effectively engage in goal setting and feedback seeking, among other things, in order to facilitate development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

I doubt therefore I coach: Critical moments in coaching practice.

How can coaches learn from moments and incidents in their own practice, particularly from moments that somehow feel critical? How can they improve working with the tension and anxiety that such moments will generate, and how might they even make use of such tensions? This is the first report of a research project into critical moments in coaching practice, which looks at critical moments of relatively inexperienced coaches. The second report, which looks at critical moments of much more experienced coaches, can be found as a companion article in this same issue. The sample size of the inexperienced coaches was 65 and 49 coaches communicating a total of 56 critical moments. Analysis of the moments revealed that they were all somehow related to a doubt that the coach had, so doubt seemed to be the overriding form of tension for the inexperienced coach. The type and nature of doubts are analyzed and the possible impact of (in-)experience is studied. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-care independence in children with neurological disorders: An interactional model of adaptive demands and executive dysfunction.

Objective: To describe a neuropsychological assessment model that proposes executive functioning as a key moderator in the development of self-care independence. Setting: Inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation facilities. Participants: Transition-age youths with congenital and acquired neurological disorders. Intervention: Transition to the adaptive roles and expectations of adulthood can be challenging for adolescents with neurological disorders and other chronic medical conditions. These individuals frequently encounter functional problems related to additional time requirements, new life skill demands, and increased need for organization and planning. In addition, the neuropsychological consequences of these disorders often include deficits in motor speed and coordination as well as executive control (including planning, organization, and working memory). Consideration of the integrity of executive function skills and the presence of atypical adaptive demands is crucial during planning for transition of individuals into self-care independence and development of an approach to assessment and intervention. Conclusions: Rehabilitation psychologists have the potential to improve the quality of life of adolescents with neurological disorders as they transition into adulthood by considering the "executive burden" posed to the individuals by various combinations of executive dysfunction and atypical adaptive demands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theraplay in the Chinese world: An intervention program for Hong Kong children with internalizing problems.

The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of Theraplay on reducing internalizing problems among young children. Described as at-risk for developing internalizing disorders, 46 children were randomly allocated to either the Theraplay condition or the wait-list control condition. A standardized measure of internalizing symptoms was completed before and after an 8-week period. Results showed that children from the Theraplay condition showed significantly fewer internalizing symptoms when compared to the waitlist group. Qualitative feedback from mothers and children were gathered to further understand the experience of Theraplay activities on the participants. Limitations and suggestions for future research directions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modifying supervisory practices to improve subunit safety: A leadership-based intervention model.

This article presents a leadership-based intervention model designed to modify supervisory monitoring and rewarding of subordinates' safety performance. Line supervisors received weekly feedback based on repeated episodic interviews with subordinates concerning the cumulative frequency of their safety-oriented interactions. This information identified the priority of safety over competing goals such as speed or schedules. Section managers received the same information and used it to communicate (high) safety priority. They also were trained to conduct episodic interviews to provide intermittent feedback after intervention, turning safety priority into an explicit performance goal. Safety-oriented interaction increased significantly in the experimental groups but remained unchanged in the control groups. This change in safety-oriented interaction was accompanied by significant (and stable) changes in minor injury rate, earplug use, and safety climate scores during the postintervention period. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A randomized controlled trial of a peer support intervention targeting antiretroviral medication adherence and depressive symptomatology in HIV-positive men and women.

Objective: To determine the efficacy of a peer-led social support intervention involving support groups and telephone contacts compared with standard clinical care to enhance antiretroviral medication adherence. Design: Randomized controlled trial with follow-up. Participants were 136 HIV-positive indigent mainly African American and Puerto Rican men and women recruited from an outpatient clinic in the Bronx, New York. The 3-month intervention was delivered by other HIV-positive clinic patients trained in addressing barriers to adherence and sensitively providing appraisal, spiritual, emotional, and informational adherence-related social support. Main outcome measures: Medical chart-abstracted HIV-1 RNA viral load, antiretroviral adherence according to electronic drug monitoring and participant self-report, and social support and depressive symptomatology. All assessments conducted at baseline, 3 months, and 6 months. Results: Intent-to-treat and as-treated analyses indicated no between-conditions intervention effects on the primary outcome of HIV-1 RNA viral load or any of the secondary outcomes at immediate postintervention or follow-up. Post hoc analyses within the intervention condition indicated greater intervention exposure was associated with higher self-reported adherence, higher social support, and lower depressive symptomatology at follow-up, even after controlling for baseline adherence. Conclusion: Null findings, consistent with the limited literature on efficacious highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) adherence interventions, may be due to insufficient exposure to the intervention, its low intensity, or the nature of the sample-a heterogeneous HAART-experienced group of patients with high levels of substance use and multiple other competing stressors. Overall, findings highlight the need for more comprehensive and intensive efforts to battle nonadherence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Links between theory of mind and executive function in young children with autism: Clues to developmental primacy.

There has been much theoretical discussion of a functional link between theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF) in autism. This study sought to establish the relationship between ToM and EF in young children with autism (M = 5 years, 6 months) and to examine issues of developmental primacy. Thirty children with autism and 40 typically developing children, matched on age and ability, were assessed on a battery of tasks measuring ToM (1st- and 2nd-order false belief) and components of EF (planning, set shifting, inhibition). A significant correlation emerged between ToM and EF variables in the autism group, independent of age and ability, while ToM and higher order planning ability remained significantly related in the comparison group. Examination of the pattern of ToM-EF impairments in the autism group revealed dissociations in 1 direction only: impaired ToM with intact EF. These findings support the view that EF may be 1 important factor in the advancement of ToM understanding in autism. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Standard care quality determines treatment outcomes in control groups of HAART-adherence intervention studies: Implications for the interpretation and comparison of intervention effects.

Objective: Clinical trials of behavioral interventions seek to enhance evidence-based health care. However, in case the quality of standard care provided to control conditions varies between studies and affects outcomes, intervention effects cannot be directly interpreted or compared. The objective of the present study was to examine whether standard care quality (SCQ) could be reliably assessed, varies between studies of highly active antiretroviral HIV-adherence interventions, and is related to the proportion of patients achieving an undetectable viral load (“success rate”). Design: Databases were searched for relevant articles. Authors of selected studies retrospectively completed a checklist with standard care activities, which were coded to compute SCQ scores. The relationship between SCQ and the success rates was examined using meta-regression. Main Outcome Measures: Cronbach’s alpha, variability in SCQ, and relation between SCQ and success rate. Results: Reliability of the SCQ instrument was high (Cronbach’s alpha = .91). SCQ scores ranged from 3.7 to 27.8 (total range = 0–30) and were highly predictive of success rate (p = .002). Conclusions: Variation in SCQ provided to control groups may substantially influence effect sizes of behavior change interventions. Future trials should therefore assess and report SCQ, and meta-analyses should control for variability in SCQ, thereby producing more accurate estimates of the effectiveness of behavior change interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of regional striatal lesions on motor, motivational, and executive aspects of progressive-ratio performance in rats.

The striatum is implicated in response selection and performance, the dorsal striatum in sensorimotor control and habit learning, and the ventral striatum in motivation and rewarded behaviors. Ventral striatal lesions produce performance changes on food-reinforced, progressive-ratio (PR) schedules, but the effects of dorsal striatal lesions on this task are not known. In this study, neither medial nor lateral dorsal striatal lesions produced deficits on the main motivational indices of PR performance. In contrast, significant impairments were observed in motoric or "executive" aspects of performance. Motivationally related manipulations of the task (food deprivation and reward magnitude) produced some subtle lesion-specific changes in behavior on these motoric or executive aspects of performance. Findings are discussed in relation to the roles of the dorsal and ventral striatum in reward-related behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social cognitive theory and cancer patients' quality of life: A meta-analysis of psychosocial intervention components.

Social cognitive theory (SCT) provides a theoretical framework to evaluate improved quality-of-life (QOL) outcomes through interventions with cancer patients. To assess whether inclusion of SCT components predicted better outcomes, focused comparisons were used to integrate results from 38 randomized studies. Interventions with more SCT components had significantly larger effect sizes than studies with fewer or no SCT components for the overall analysis (Z = 3.72, p     

A longitudinal study of the moderating role of extraversion: Leader-member exchange, performance, and turnover during new executive development.

Identifying factors that help or hinder new executives in "getting up to speed" quickly and remaining with an organization is vital to maximizing the effectiveness of executive development. The current study extends past research by examining extraversion as a moderator of relationships between leader-member exchange (LMX) and performance, turnover intentions, and actual turnover for an executive sample. The sample consisted of 116 new executives who were surveyed prior to starting their employment and at 3 months postentry. A total of 67 senior executives rated these new executives in terms of overall performance at 6 months postentry. Turnover data were gathered from company records 3 1/2 years later. Hierarchical regression results showed that LMX was not related to performance or turnover intentions for those high in extraversion; but for individuals low in extraversion, there was a relation between LMX, performance, and turnover intentions. Furthermore, survival analyses showed that LMX was only related to turnover-hazard rate for individuals low in extraversion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The temporal relationship between alcohol consumption and HIV-medication adherence: A multilevel model of direct and moderating effects.

Previous studies documenting an association between alcohol use and HIV medication nonadherence, have been unable to distinguish between-persons characteristics from within-person characteristics representing the temporally linked effects of alcohol. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) explored within- and between-person predictors of adherence during the past 14 days, as well as factors that moderate the event-level effects of alcohol consumption among 272 HIV-positive men and women with alcohol problems. On days in which participants drank, they had almost 9 times higher odds of medication nonadherence, with each drink increasing the odds by 20%. The cognitive and alcohol factors had significant between-person effects on adherence. Individuals with strong and rigid beliefs about the importance of strict medication adherence were significantly more affected by each dose of alcohol, while individuals with more alcohol use and problems were less affected by each drink. Regimen complexity increased the effects of having 1 or more drinks. These results highlight the importance of promoting medication adherence among alcohol-using adults, especially among patients with complex regimens or with high confidence and positive attitudes toward HIV medication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Closer Look at the Work of Brogan, Prochaska, and Prochaska (1999): Comment.

Advocates of the transtheoretical model (TTM) of change have claimed that the stage-of-change construct along with other TTM variables can serve as extremely accurate predictors of treatment retention. Much of the empirical support for this claim rests upon the work of M. Brogan, J. O. Prochaska, and J. Prochaska (1999; see record 1999-11589-001). A careful examination of the M. Brogan et al. article, however, reveals 3 major concerns: (a) the primary figure (see their Figure 1) does not represent the results of the statistical analyses described in the article, (b) the discriminant function analysis (DFA) models demonstrate contradictory and theory-disconfirming patterns, and (c) the small sample-size-to-predictor ratio in the DFA analyses and the lack of model cross-validation undermine the reliability of the findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Facilitating children's proportional reasoning: A model of reasoning processes and effects of intervention on strategy change.

In this study, 140 fourth graders were asked to solve proportion problems about juice-mixing situations both before and after an intervention that used a manipulative model or other materials in 3 experiments. Using a manipulative model based on children's prior knowledge about crowdedness and equal distribution was effective in letting children discover a unit strategy, which was useful for solving proportion problems. The model was more effective for those who had an appropriate representation but could not correctly compare juice concentrations than it was for those who didn't have the representation. On the basis of this study, different approaches appear to be necessary to facilitate children's proportional reasoning, depending on the reasoning process (representation or comparison) with which children are having difficulty. Interventions on the basis of the process model and learning that builds on intuitive knowledge are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Enhancing home-based child care quality through video-feedback intervention: A randomized controlled trial.

In the present randomized controlled trial, the effectiveness of video-feedback intervention to promote positive parenting–child care (VIPP-CC) was tested in home-based child care. Forty-eight caregivers were randomly assigned either to the intervention group or to the control group. Global child care quality improved in the intervention group but not in the control group. The program did not change observed caregiver sensitivity. After the intervention however, caregivers in the intervention group reported a more positive attitude toward sensitive caregiving than caregivers in the control group. The study shows that the family-based intervention can be applied with some minor modifications in a professional group setting as well. The brief VIPP-CC program is an important tool for enhancing quality of home-based child care. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Helping students succeed in the regular classroom: A guide for developing intervention assistance programs.

Reviews the book, Helping students succeed in the regular classroom: A guide for developing intervention assistance programs by Joseph E. Zins, Michael J. Curtis, Janet L. Graden, and Charlene R. Ponti (see record 1988-97800-000). The goal of this book is to provide sufficient detail to enable practitioners to make intervention assistance programs integral components of their current educational systems. Authored by four of the field's leading scholars and practitioners in the area of prereferral intervention, the book clearly succeeds in achieving these goals and, hopefully, in helping to stave off the "bandwagon" mentality that could easily engulf the new service delivery models that are appearing nationwide. Helping Students Succeed in the Regular Classroom begins at a conceptual level by examining the rationale, logic and need for intervention assistance programs. Reflecting the best of contemporary thinking in this area, the authors' arguments for alternatives to traditional special education services are sound and convincing. Moving beyond merely critiquing the mistakes of traditional service delivery models, the book rapidly builds a solid theoretical framework from which innovative solutions to old and persistent problems can be developed. Complementing the conceptual and theoretical elements of the book is a broad-ranging overview of pragmatic, "how to" information for the practitioner. If Helping Students Succeed in the Regular Classroom has a shortcoming, it is that some of these practice-oriented chapters suffer from trying to cover too much material in too little space. For example, while the authors acknowledge the critical nature of obtaining sanction and support at the district level for intervention assistance programs, they devote less than one page to this extremely complex topic. Overall, I recommend this book to the readership of School Psychology Quarterly with great enthusiasm. It addresses topics of critical importance to our field, and does so in a well-reasoned, scholarly and practical manner. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A systematic and transparent approach for assessing the methodological quality of intervention effectiveness research: The Study Design and Implementation Assessment Device (Study DIAD).

Assessments of studies meant to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, programs, and policies can serve an important role in the interpretation of research results. However, evidence suggests that available quality assessment tools have poor measurement characteristics and can lead to opposing conclusions when applied to the same body of studies. These tools tend to (a) be insufficiently operational, (b) rely on arbitrary post-hoc decision rules, and (c) result in a single number to represent a multidimensional construct. In response to these limitations, a multilevel and hierarchical instrument was developed in consultation with a wide range of methodological and statistical experts. The instrument focuses on the operational details of studies and results in a profile of scores instead of a single score to represent study quality. A pilot test suggested that satisfactory between-judge agreement can be obtained using well-trained raters working in naturalistic conditions. Limitations of the instrument are discussed, but these are inherent in making decisions about study quality given incomplete reporting and in the absence of strong, contextually based information about the effects of design flaws on study outcomes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)