Coaching as a Catalyst to Facilitate Spiritual Leadership

This study explores how a structured coaching intervention can enhance the development of spiritual leadership within organisational contexts. Drawing on Fry's Spiritual Leadership Theory, the research adopts a longitudinal mixed-method design integrating self-assessment instruments, reflective journals and coaching session transcripts. The findings suggest that coaching supported self-reported growth in leaders’ vision, altruistic love and hope/faith, which participants associated with more ethical decision-making, greater authenticity and improved team engagement. Given the small, purposive sample and the reliance on self-report data, these findings are offered as exploratory and analytically, rather than statistically, generalisable. The study contributes an integrative Spiritual Leadership Coaching Framework and a preliminary theorisation of the mechanism through which coaching may facilitate spiritual leadership development, grounded in a South African, Ubuntu-informed context.