Coaching leadership and subordinates’ career success: The mediating role of leader–member exchange

Abstract

Although a coaching leadership style has an inherent advantage in predicting the subordinates’ career success, there is still little known about the linkage and the specific process by which coaching leadership influences career success. We examined the relationship between coaching leadership and subordinates’ career success, especially the mediating role of leader–member exchange (LMX), through a survey conducted with 301 supervisor–subordinate pairs of a large state-owned enterprise in Shanghai, China. Using Hayes’ PROCESS macro, we conducted a Sobel test and bootstrapping to test our hypotheses. As predicted, we found that coaching leadership was positively related to both subjective and objective career success of subordinates. In addition, LMX mediated the influence of coaching leadership on career success of subordinates. Our findings provide a new theoretical perspective for explaining the impact of coaching leadership.