Stress and performance coaching

Workplace stress is a serious problem that is causing great concern and has been gaining attention from both academic journals and the press for some years (Arthur, 2004; Palmer and Laungani, 2003). Indeed, it is related to a number of negative psychological, physiological and economical outcomes (Palmer and Cooper, 2010). It is important that action is taken to tackle stress and organisations employ many different interventions in order to prevent and manage stress. An intervention that is not commonly associated with stress reduction is coaching (Gyllensten and Palmer, 2006; Palmer and Gyllensten, 2008). Nevertheless, it was suggested a decade ago that coaching could be useful in tackling stress by helping to identify causes of stress, developing new effective strategies and maintaining the changes (Hearn, 2001).