Coaching Leadership and Employee Thriving Through Person–Job and Person–Organization Fit: A Three-Wave Time-Lagged Study

Although coaching leadership is consistently linked to positive employee outcomes, the psychological pathways through which it is associated with employee thriving remain theoretically underspecified. Applying a stage-specific extension of person–environment (PE) fit theory, this study examined a parallel indirect-effect model in which coaching leadership is associated with thriving through person–job fit (PJF) and person–organization fit (POF) as parallel mediators. Rather than relying on regression-based path comparisons alone, this study employed path analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM) and two equality-constrained model comparisons via likelihood ratio tests (LRTs) to test whether coaching leadership’s antecedent-side associations with PJF and POF differ, and whether PJF and POF’s outcome-side associations with thriving differ. Data were collected from 427 Korean employees using a three-wave time-lagged design (coaching leadership at T1, PJF and POF at T2, thriving at T3). One person–organization fit item with a markedly weak standardized loading (λ = 0.164) was identified during measurement-model testing and removed; all results reported here are based on the resulting refined measurement. Coaching leadership was positively associated with both PJF (B = 0.27, β = 0.33) and POF (B = 0.44, β = 0.50), and this antecedent-side association was significantly stronger for POF, Δχ2(1) = 28.30, p < 0.001. On the outcome side, both PJF (B = 0.32, β = 0.28) and POF (B = 0.16, β = 0.15) were positively associated with thriving, and the equality-constrained comparison did not detect a significant difference between the two outcome-side associations, Δχ2(1) = 1.82, p = 0.177. A bootstrap analysis of the indirect associations indicated that both the indirect association through PJF (0.086, 95% CI [0.044, 0.133]) and the indirect association through POF (0.072, 95% CI [0.004, 0.148]) were reliably different from zero, while the contrast between the two indirect associations was not significant (0.014, 95% CI [−0.092, 0.112]). These findings suggest that PJF and POF follow distinct patterns of association with coaching leadership at the antecedent side, even though their outcome-side associations with thriving and their overall indirect contributions could not be shown to differ.