Consulting

Emotional intelligence (EI) is used in organizational training, coaching, and graduate schools. Despite its acceptance in practical applications, researchers continue to argue about its validity. EI can be defined “as a constellation of components from within a person that enable self-awareness of and management of his/her emotions, and to be aware of and manage the emotions of others.” EI seems to exist at the performance trait or ability, self-schema and trait, and behavioral levels. Based on this multilevel view, all the conceptualizations of EI and the different measures that result are EI. Research on the behavioral level of EI—its assessment, strengths, psychometric validity, and challenges—complements that on other approaches, which have already been the subject of many academic papers.

Entrepreneur coachability is the degree to which an entrepreneur seeks, carefully considers, and integrates feedback to improve a venture’s performance. There is increasing evidence that entrepreneur coachability is important for attracting the social and financial resources necessary for venture growth. Although entrepreneur coachability has emerged as an especially relevant construct for practitioners, start-up ecosystem leaders, and scholars alike, research on this entrepreneurial behavior is in its infancy. What appears to be a consistent finding across studies is that some entrepreneurs are more coachable than others, which affects downstream outcomes—particularly resource acquisition. However, there are sizable theoretical and empirical gaps that limit our understanding about the value of coachability to entrepreneurship research. As a body of literature develops, it is useful to take inventory of the work that has been accomplished thus far and to build from the lessons learned to identify insightful new directions. The topic of entrepreneur coachability has interdisciplinary appeal, and there is a surge of entrepreneur coaching taking place across start-up ecosystems. Research on coaching is diverse, and scholarship has developed across the academic domains of athletics, marketing, workplace coaching, and entrepreneurship. To identify progress to date, promising research gaps, and paths for future exploration, the literature on entrepreneur coachability is critically reviewed. To consider the future development of entrepreneur coachability scholarship, a research agenda is organized by the antecedents of entrepreneurship coachability, outcomes of entrepreneur coachability, and how entrepreneur–coach fit affects learning and development. Future scholarship is needed to more fully explore the antecedents, mechanisms, and/or consequences of entrepreneur coachability. The pursuit and development of this research stream represent fertile ground for meaningful contributions to entrepreneurship theory and practice.

Professions or professional occupations have been studied through a large number of empirical and theoretical lenses over the last decades: as potential substitutes for organizations and markets, as protected labor markets, and as the site of the subjective experiences and socialization processes of their members. Combining a sociological and a gender perspective, a growing number of studies have shed new light on the growth and dynamics of professional occupations since the mid-20th century. They show how the massive entry of women into the upper reaches of Western labor markets has played a major role in the expansion and reconfiguration of the professions. However, by studying the barriers to women’s access to once exclusively masculine environments, scholars tend to show that the feminization processes coexist with persistent inequalities in income, promotion opportunities, career patterns, and access to leadership positions, popularized by the metaphor of the “glass ceiling” effect. These contradicting trends—numerical feminization and the persistence of gender inequalities—have inspired a large range of empirical research projects and conceptual innovations. This article distinguishes three ways of framing the gendered dynamics of professional and managerial occupations. A first way of framing the issue adopts a resolutely structural perspective, presenting feminization as a process that ultimately leads to the crystallization of traditional gender inequalities, thus confronting women with the risk of deprofessionalization or dequalification. Some of these studies observe variations in the rhythms and patterns of feminization across occupations. They reveal complex processes whereby the overall increase in women’s education levels comes with the persistence of gender-differentiated choices of study and occupation. Rhythms and patterns of feminization may also differ within a given occupation, from one specialty to another and from one type of organization to another, depending on the internal hierarchy of the occupation. Very significant gaps may also be observed according to employment status: wage labor or self-employment, for example. A second way of framing the question adopts an organizational-level perspective; showing, for example, that a “glass ceiling” systematically hampers women’s career progression in all sectors of the labor market. These studies explore the combination of direct and indirect discriminatory processes—from the persistence of “old boys’ networks” to the legitimation of certain gendered body images of professionalism—within different organizational and professional contexts. In the face of such resistance, women’s career progression is particularly slow and arduous, both due to the prevailing symbolic norms of leadership models and due to the collective strategies of closure by male professionals at the organizational level. Finally, a third way of framing the issue adopts a more holistic perspective, with a stronger focus on the agency of women within the occupational context and on the societal implications of changes to the gender composition of the professions. These studies insist on the potential or real changes that women may bring to the professional ethos and to the occupation-specific “rules of the game” in previously male-dominated bastions. Interested in the undoing of conventional norms of masculinity and fathering as well as of femininity and mothering, this third perspective explores a potential shift to more egalitarian gender arrangements at the organizational, interpersonal, and societal levels.

Qualitative research designs provide future-oriented plans for undertaking research. Designs should describe how to effectively address and answer a specific research question using qualitative data and qualitative analysis techniques. Designs connect research objectives to observations, data, methods, interpretations, and research outcomes. Qualitative research designs focus initially on collecting data to provide a naturalistic view of social phenomena and understand the meaning the social world holds from the point of view of social actors in real settings. The outcomes of qualitative research designs are situated narratives of peoples’ activities in real settings, reasoned explanations of behavior, discoveries of new phenomena, and creating and testing of theories. A three-level framework can be used to describe the layers of qualitative research design and conceptualize its multifaceted nature. Note, however, that qualitative research is a flexible and not fixed process, unlike conventional positivist research designs that are unchanged after data collection commences. Flexibility provides qualitative research with the capacity to alter foci during the research process and make new and emerging discoveries. The first or methods layer of the research design process uses social science methods to rigorously describe organizational phenomena and provide evidence that is useful for explaining phenomena and developing theory. Description is done using empirical research methods for data collection including case studies, interviews, participant observation, ethnography, and collection of texts, records, and documents. The second or methodological layer of research design offers three formal logical strategies to analyze data and address research questions: (a) induction to answer descriptive “what” questions; (b) deduction and hypothesis testing to address theory oriented “why” questions; and (c) abduction to understand questions about what, how, and why phenomena occur. The third or social science paradigm layer of research design is formed by broad social science traditions and approaches that reflect distinct theoretical epistemologies—theories of knowledge—and diverse empirical research practices. These perspectives include positivism, interpretive induction, and interpretive abduction (interpretive science). There are also scholarly research perspectives that reflect on and challenge or seek to change management thinking and practice, rather than producing rigorous empirical research or evidence based findings. These perspectives include critical research, postmodern research, and organization development. Three additional issues are important to future qualitative research designs. First, there is renewed interest in the value of covert research undertaken without the informed consent of participants. Second, there is an ongoing discussion of the best style to use for reporting qualitative research. Third, there are new ways to integrate qualitative and quantitative data. These are needed to better address the interplay of qualitative and quantitative phenomena that are both found in everyday discourse, a phenomenon that has been overlooked.