In only a few years coaching, as a person-centered intervention, has become a major trend in businesses and non-profit organizations. Taking into account that nearly half of all large businesses in the western industrialized countries are currently providing coaching services for their managers, coaching appears as a phenomenon with a considerable, but hardly researched, impact on organizational life.
Following a processual, linguistic approach as used in Organizational Psychology, coaching can be understood as a set of discursive practices whose goals and enactments are socially constructed and thus need to be negotiated within the politically charged spheres of the managerial realm. Furthermore, as people involved with coaching simultaneously draw upon both managerial as well as psychotherapeutic (discursive) practices, each infused with partly contradicting logics, coaching can be interpreted as an ongoing translation processes that may evoke tensions and frictions in social life but also fusions and innovative ways of organizing.
Florian asks in his dissertation how these different images of coaching are linguistically performed and how they are used to account for specific effects in the organization of managerial life. Additionally, he takes special interest in the construction of (gendered) subject positions and emotions within coaching conversations.
With a sound background as a psychotherapist in systemic and psychoanalytic methodologies as well as having performed university training in reflexive social and family psychology, Florian joined the Research Institute for Organizational Psychology in May 2008. Here, he is currently employed as a research assistant to the Institute as well as a member of the Psychological Counseling Center (beratung@psy) of the university.
Interests
- Narrative theories of change
- Process research for organizational interventions
- The organization of emotions through interventions
- Happiness in organizational theory
- Psychoanalytically informed organizational theory