QUANTITATIVE STUDY Managerial coaching of frontline employees: The moderating role of gender Claudio Pousa 1 | David A. Richards 1 | Carole Trépanier 2 1 Faculty of Business Administration, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada 2 Training and Coaching, Addendum, Quebec, Canada Correspondence Dr. Claudio Pousa, DBA, Lakehead University, Faculty of Business Administration, Thunder Bay, Canada. Email: cepousa@lakeheadu.ca Managerial coaching (also known as the leader-as-coach model) is becoming prevalent as a new management paradigm to develop and empower employees and help them increase their perfor- mance. At the same time, the composition of the workforce has changed, with female employees reaching almost 50% of workers and around 30% of managers. Accordingly, scholars have set out to understand if gender affects managerial behaviors and employee responses. The goal of this study is to evaluate if significant differ- ences in performance should be expected when coaching female and male employees. The results suggest that female and male responses to managerial coaching are more complex than expected. Managerial coaching positively affects female behavioral and result performance and male behavioral performance, but—contrary to expectations—no significant effect was found for coaching on male result performance. Additionally, female and male employees differ in their self-evaluation of the focal performance constructs, with females evaluating their contribution to performance at lower levels than their male counterparts. The results suggest that, to be an effective developmental tool, the approach taken with coaching should take into consideration the recipient's gender and address different areas of performance. KEYWORDS gender, leader-as-coach model, managerial coaching, performance management, role congruity theory, social exchange theory 1 | INTRODUCTION The new millennium has seen acceleration in the pace of the environmental change that affects organizations, which is characterized by a more complex work environment, the need for more collaboration with customers and other people in the organization, and increasing levels of accountability to customers for a better service (Ingram, LaForge, DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21322 Human Resource Development Quarterly. 2018;29:219–241. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrdq © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 219