Coaching style and performance: The mediating roles of subjective task complexity and goals

This study examined the main effects of coaching style, directive and problem-solving, on the performance of two different tasks, coached and transfer, as well as the mediating effects of subjective task complexity and goal level on these relationships. Experimental data were collected from 124 participants. The results showed that directive coaching leads to better performance than does problem-solving coaching for the coached task, but problem-solving coaching leads to better performance than directive coaching on the transfer task. Contrasting mediating effects were found for subjective task complexity and goal level on the coached versus transfer task.