How Does Informal Coaching Promote Job Satisfaction? The Roles of Innovative Behavior and Delegative Leadership

Scholarly attention to how informal coaching shapes job satisfaction has been limited, with the intervening role of innovative behavior and the boundary-setting function of delegative leadership especially neglected. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, this study traces the mechanisms by which informal coaching practices influence employees’ work satisfaction. A two-wave survey of 895 academic staff across Vietnamese universities reveals that both supervisory and collegial informal coaching independently predict higher job satisfaction. Innovative behavior emerges as a significant conduit for these effects. Of note, high delegative leadership weakens the coaching–satisfaction association for collegial coaching, while no comparable moderation was detected for supervisory coaching on job satisfaction or innovative behavior, or for collegial coaching on innovative behavior. Innovative behavior partially mediates these effects, as the direct coaching–satisfaction associations remain significant alongside the significant indirect effects.