We propose that I/O psychologists who coach executives have overlooked psychotherapy outcome research as a source of information and ideas that can be used to improve our executive coaching practices. This research, based on thousands of studies and many meta-analyses, has converged on the conclusion that four “active ingredients” account for most of the variance in psychotherapy outcomes. We describe how this literature has identified four primary “active ingredients” that account for most of the variance in psychotherapy outcomes: 1) Client/extratherapeutic factors (40%), 2) The relationship or alliance (30%), 3) Placebo or hope (15%), and 4) Theory and technique (15%). Working on the assumption that psychotherapy and executive coaching are sufficiently similar to justify generalization from one domain to the other, we describe these four active ingredients at length and explore how they may be at work in the executive coaching process. We also suggest that I/O psychologists have training and experience that allows us to leverage some of these active ingredients in our executive coaching (e.g., understanding of client individual differences related to coaching outcomes). But we also have areas of weakness (e.g., building a strong working relationship with an individual client) that may need to be bolstered with additional training and development experiences.

In this response, we address commentator concerns about the generalizability of the active ingredients of psychotherapy to the science and practice of executive coaching. We discuss four ingredient that may make a difference: (a) client characteristics, (b) goals or success criteria, (c) role of the organization, and (d) contextual knowledge of the executive coach. We explore how each of these differences is likely to affect the weighting of the four active ingredients in the equation for predicting executive coaching outcomes. From this analysis, we re-affirm our hypotheses that the active ingredients are generalizable to coaching and hold promise for strengthening research and practice. We conclude by highlighting the efforts of several commentators to extend and deepen our hypotheses to other areas of leadership development.

Innovation, the development and intentional introduction of new and useful ideas by individuals, teams, and organizations, lies at the heart of human adaptation. Decades of research in different disciplines and at different organizational levels have produced a wealth of knowledge about how innovation emerges and the factors that facilitate and inhibit innovation. We propose that this knowledge needs integration. In an initial step toward this goal, we apply a dialectic perspective on innovation to overcome limitations of dichotomous reasoning and to gain a more valid account of innovation. We point out that individuals, teams, and organizations need to self-regulate and manage conflicting demands of innovation and that multiple pathways can lead to idea generation and innovation. By scrutinizing the current use of the concept of organizational ambidexterity and extending it to individuals and teams, we develop a framework to help guide and facilitate future research and practice. Readers expecting specific and universal prescriptions of how to innovate will be disappointed as current research does not allow such inferences. Rather, we think innovation research should focus on developing and testing principles of innovation management in addition to developing decision aids for organizational practice. To this end, we put forward key propositions and action principles of innovation management.

We have proposed that a dialectic perspective on innovation may serve well as a first step of an integrative framework for research on innovation and for effective practice. We would like to thank all commentators for their stimulating and challenging ideas and SIOP for enabling this dialog. In keeping with the process view inherent to dialectic thinking, we would like to use this reply to refine and extend the core ideas presented in the focal article by means of integrating explanatory concepts, by critically examining the add-on value of a dialectic perspective, and by pointing out future research needs and ideas for management.