Thus, reliance on hierarchy as a guide to getting along in the workplace is beginning to shift through employee engagement to encouragement of collaboration in more transparent managerial decision-making, and organizational coaching is emerging from this shift. Contributing fields include management theory; industrial/ organizational psychology; social psychology; field and social network theories; family systems therapy; appreciative inquiry; and human capital research.

If indeed, as Mayo (1933) insisted, the major factor in business success is the quality of relationships in the workplace, then business success is itself a measure of how well people get along. If hard measures of success support the soft assumptions of coaching, then we can perhaps spread more widely the lessons of relatedness rather than competitive self-interest, of taking subjective values and feelings into account, of allowing people to participate in decision making, of recognizing uniqueness and creativity, of appreciating contributions to the common good, and of sharing leadership. All these result from the series of shifts chronicled in this section, and all characterize organizational coaching to a great extent.

The five questions considered above are related to issues clients bring to coaching. For each question, disciplines that contribute theories and research to coaching have been provided. This list may not be exhaustive, but it is an indication that theories exist as candidates for meeting the first challenge, that of providing a substantial knowledge base for organizational coaching. However, there are many practices that draw on various academic disciplines but are not considered cohesive enough to form a specific discipline related to that practice. Hobbies such as caving (or spelunking) or gardening provide examples. They may draw on disciplines such as biology or geology, or botany in the case of gardening, but they are not disciplines in themselves. This consideration leads to the second challenge.

Challenge 2: Coaching (whatever it is called) must be shown to be a unique and coherent discipline

The second challenge of providing coherence for a possible coaching discipline is discussed in the context of a major shift during the 20’h century that affects what is considered legitimate scientific and scholarly inquiry. Rock and Page (2009) refer to this as a shift from a mechanistic to a systemic paradigm and examine coaching as a product of that shift. In this article, I further propose that the systemic paradigm provides assumptions that support a cohesive discipline for coaching, one that builds upon other disciplines yet is not limited to any one of them. The name “Neurosocial Dynamics” is proposed for this new discipline. Neuroscience, itself an inheritor of and contributor to the systemic shift, is suggested as an important source for future evidence to support the new discipline.

Meeting this second challenge requires identifying some frame or principle that both unites the disparate theories that support coaching practice and differentiates it sufficiently from existing disciplines. One possible frame is revealed by the shifts that have occurred across the various disciplines described above. Let us look more closely at these shifts.

During the 17th century, Isaac Newton discovered the principles of motion and gravity that were then thought to explain all natural events. The success of  his methods,  combined  with affirmation by Renee Descartes of the dualistic view that divided reality into “physical” and “spiritual,” had profound effects on intellectual inquiry in the Western world from the l 8’h through 20″‘ centuries. Under the influence of logical positivism in philosophy, scientific evidence was limited to what was objectively observable; ethics and values were rejected as topics of interest because they were unverifiable; and scientific statements could only be true, false, or meaningless. Scholars in the fields of medicine, psychology, psychotherapy, and management strove to become more scientific in these ways.