Executive coaching, organisational change, and employee retention: what the evidence suggests
During organisational change, employee retention often becomes harder to predict. Restructures, mergers, digital transformation, and role redesign can increase uncertainty, workload, and emotional strain. In these conditions, even previously stable teams may experience increased attrition.
While coaching is often positioned as an individual development intervention, emerging evidence suggests it may also influence wider organisational outcomes, including employee retention.
Coaching as a culture-level intervention
Executive coaching is typically described as a personalised, reflective development process focused on leadership effectiveness. It is less often discussed as a culture intervention.
However, leaders play a central role in shaping how change is experienced day to day. Their behaviour influences:
psychological safety
clarity and sense-making
fairness and consistency
how pressure is managed
how people experience uncertainty
If coaching shifts how leaders relate to their teams during change, it may indirectly influence whether employees choose to stay or leave.
What the evidence suggests about coaching and retention
Field-based research examining executive coaching during organisational change has explored whether coaching is associated with differences in employee attrition.
In one applied study, senior leaders were split into two groups during a period of major organisational change:
one group received six months of executive coaching
one group did not
Employee attrition among their direct reports was tracked over time.
The findings suggested that teams led by coached leaders experienced lower voluntary attrition than those led by uncoached leaders. When analysed using survival analysis methods, the coached group appeared to have a substantially lower risk of employee departure during the observation period.
While the study had limitations, including a short follow-up window and a relatively small number of attrition events, it provides early causal evidence that coaching may offer protective value during change.
Why coaching might influence retention during change
The mechanisms are not fully established, but several possibilities are worth considering.
Coaching may support leaders to:
regulate their own stress and emotional responses
communicate more clearly during uncertainty
hold difficult conversations with less defensiveness
maintain relational consistency under pressure
notice early signs of disengagement within teams
These factors may matter more during change than during stable periods. Employees often cite leadership behaviour, not organisational strategy, as a key reason for staying or leaving.
Financial implications for organisations
Employee attrition during change is costly. Recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity, and disruption to team functioning all carry financial and operational impact.
When coaching is evaluated using objective outcomes such as retention, it becomes possible to estimate cost avoidance rather than relying solely on self-reported benefit. In applied settings, this has translated into substantial estimated savings over relatively short timeframes, alongside positive return on investment.
These figures should be interpreted cautiously, but they raise an important point: coaching may represent a strategic investment rather than a discretionary development cost, particularly during periods of transformation.
Coaching, culture repair, and organisational resilience
From a culture perspective, the value of coaching may lie in its indirect effects.
Rather than “fixing” individuals, coaching may:
stabilise leadership behaviour during disruption
reduce spillover stress into teams
support more humane change processes
protect trust when systems are under strain
For organisations focused on culture repair or culture change, coaching may be one lever among many that influences how change is experienced at the human level.
Implications for how organisations use coaching
This evidence suggests several considerations:
Coaching may be most impactful when deployed during periods of change, not only for high performers.
Leaders with large, stretched, or vulnerable teams may be priority candidates.
Evaluating coaching using objective organisational outcomes may provide stronger insight than satisfaction measures alone.
Coaching should be viewed as part of a wider system, alongside workload, role clarity, and organisational support.
Coaching alone will not prevent attrition. But it may contribute to conditions that make staying more possible.
Closing reflection
During organisational change, retention is rarely driven by a single factor. It emerges from how people experience leadership, fairness, safety, and meaning under pressure.
Executive coaching may not guarantee retention. It may, however, influence how leaders show up when it matters most.
For organisations seeking to protect culture during change, this raises a useful question: not whether coaching works in isolation, but how it interacts with the wider system in which people decide whether to stay.
Reference:
Palermo, G. (2026, January 14). Coaching for survival: How executive coaching protects against employee attrition during organizational transformation [Oral presentation]. Division of Occupational Psychology Conference.
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