Crossing the Border: Who Coaches Clients With Clinical Concerns?

In the business world, coaching has established itself as an important instrument of personnel development. At the same time, however, psychological disorders in the workplace are on the rise. Combined, these trends mean that more business coaches may encounter clients who contact the coach with a psychotherapeutic need. An initial explorative and qualitative study has revealed that coaches frequently accept and attempt to treat clinical cases. In our study, we analyze this phenomenon with an optimized methodical approach. We confronted 160 coaches with six coaching cases. Three cases featured a clinical concern: depression (F32), generalized anxiety disorder (F41.1), or borderline (F60.31). Our results indicate that, particularly often, coaches accept a depressive client and do not advise the client to see a psychotherapist. Using a path model, we can demonstrate that more job experience is related to more self-efficacy beliefs. In turn, job-related self-efficacy beliefs are associated with a higher probability of accepting clinical cases and with a lower probability of advising the client to see a psychotherapist. Furthermore, we found perceived clinical knowledge to be a moderating factor for this relationship. Business coaches who believe they have more clinical knowledge are more inclined to accept clinical cases with growing self-efficacy beliefs.