Intercultural leadership coaching, an innovative form of coaching for leadership development, has experienced rapid growth in organizations worldwide. This form of coaching, where a coach and a coachee in a leadership role come from different cultural backgrounds, bears great potential for developing leaders due to the different cultural perspectives involved. However, due to cultural diversity, achieving successful outcomes in intercultural dyads could also be more challenging. Moreover, we know little about its success factors. A high-quality coaching relationship has been acknowledged as an essential success factor in monocultural and intercultural dyads. However, limited research focused on predictors of coaching relationship in intercultural leadership coaching. By drawing on social exchange theory, our study examines the predictors of the coaching relationship in intercultural leadership coaching from both coach and coachee perspectives. The study is based on a pre-post global survey of 107 intercultural coaching dyads comprising UN agencies and INGO’s leaders and their coaches, jointly representing 74 nationalities. Our study contributes to the coaching literature by shedding light on what drives the quality of coaching relationship in intercultural leadership coaching from both coach and coachee perspectives. In particular, the study identifies two novel predictors which are coach motivational CQ and coachee well-being. Further, it validates the importance of coach credibility and coachee resilience as predictors of a high-quality coaching relationship in intercultural settings. Finally, this is a pioneering quantitative study of intercultural leadership dyads carried out in the much-underexplored context of INGOs, whose role is increasingly vital for societal well-being.
