Questioning in Business Coaching: Preliminary Insights into their Int...

The academic attention devoted to questioning practices in various helping professions confirms their status as key intervention. They simultaneously serve informational and interactional management purposes, documenting both the co-construction of knowledge among participants and their building of a working alliance (Stivers 2019). Accordingly, questions are considered powerful change-inducing instruments in helping interactions and have been empirically corroborated as such in research; however, in coaching, despite their prominence in practice literature, they still represent a major research gap.

In light of this, Questioning Sequences in Executive Coaching, an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods project combining linguistic and psychological epistemes, aims to shed light on the nature of questioning practices and their role in clients’ change process both on the local (i.e. successful completion of sequences, phases and processes) and the global (i.e. goal attainment) levels of effectiveness. Using authentic coaching-processes, the project’s linguistic focus is on developing a coaching-specific typology of questioning sequences and analyzing their local effectiveness as transformative sequences (Peräkylä 2019) by drawing on Conversation Analysis, Gesprächsanalyse and interactional linguistics. The first analyses are guided by "sensitizing concepts" (Blumer 1969) and existing research on questioning practices in psychotherapy (Mack et al. 2016; Spranz-Fogasy 2020).

In this talk, we will presented preliminary insights into (formal and functional) coaching-specific characteristics of questioning practices. We presented an inductively developed typology of questions, which constitute our target action in the development of a coaching-specific typology of questioning sequences.