| Beschreibung: |
Responsiveness is a fundamental yet ill-defined concept in helping professional interactions such as coaching. CA-based definitions focusing on intersubjectivity and sequence organization (e.g. Schegloff 2007) or the degree of thematic progress and fulfillment of the initiating turn’s social expectations (e.g. Schwitalla 1979) seem insufficient to grasp the concept of responsiveness for helping professional purposes. Such views focus only on the second pair part as (non-)responsive to the initiating action, but not to higher-level activities (Pomerantz 2021). In coaching, such higher-level orientation is not only shown by coaches, but also by clients who may rather orient to the ongoing activity in which the sequence is embedded (e.g., solution generation). Furthermore, as actions may be both responsive and initiatory (Vehviläinen et al. 2008), responsiveness exists in the second (client’s reaction) and third position (coach’s reaction to the reaction). In psychology, responsiveness has been described as behavior that is affected by the context and the participants, who adapt to each other and their surrounding circumstances (Kramer & Stiles 2015 for psychotherapy). Such responsive behavior sees therapists aiming to facilitate the desired outcomes (Stiles et al. 1998). However, as good practice is influenced by many aspects, classical psychological research designs are insufficient to study and fully model it (Stiles 2015). In the interdisciplinary project “Questioning Sequences in Coaching” (Graf et al. 2020), we conceptualize responsiveness in coaching as the orientation of participants towards the progressivity of action at the sequential level, the progressivity towards the goal achievement, relational affiliation, and, in the case of the coach, also their theory of change. Such a view allows insights into appropriate responsiveness (Kramer and Stiles 2015:279) according to which professionals and clients “try to do the right thing at the right time” to further their goals. By combining a CA-based approach with psychological understandings of change processes, we thus seek to gain a more profound understanding of how responsiveness is related to the overall effectiveness of coaching. In this talk, we focussed on second and third positions in questioning sequences occurring in authentic business coaching. We illustrated how clients and coaches are attuned to each other, the goal, the underlying theory etc. by analyzing successful and less successful examples linguistically and psychologically. |