When organisations invest in leadership or team development, the question inevitably arises: What’s the return on investment (ROI)? In an age of budget constraints and strategic accountability, demonstrating the impact of coaching interventions is essential.
In individual coaching, evidence is well established. Studies have shown ROIs between five and ten times the original investment. The ICF/PwC Global Coaching Client Study found a median company return of 700%, meaning companies typically gain seven times their investment. Similarly, a FMI (2018) study stated that executives believed coaching provided a high ROI. More recently, the International Coaching Federation (2024) reported that individual performance can rise by 70% and team performance by 50% following executive coaching.
However, when it comes to psychodynamic team coaching, measuring ROI becomes far more complex. This is because team coaching involves the invisible emotional and relational undercurrents within teams, the “soft” dynamics that drive hard results. While team outcomes such as trust, collaboration, and alignment may indirectly improve financial performance, they are difficult to isolate and quantify. Real-world variability between teams further complicates standardised measurement.
The cost of ineffective teams
Sometimes, the best way to understand the value of team coaching is to look at the cost of not having it.
The cost of ineffective teams shows up in multiple, quantifiable ways. Studies have shown ineffective teams carrying significant financial and operational burdens. Gallup (2024) estimates that low employee engagement drains US$8.9 trillion from global productivity annually, almost 9% of global GDP. Within organisations, poor execution and misalignment are costly: PMI (2018) reports that 9.9% of every project dollar is wasted due to poor project performance, often linked to weak cross-team coordination.
Turnover is another costly consequence. SHRM (2025) notes that the average cost-per-hire is US$4,700, meaning that high attrition caused by dysfunctional teams rapidly compounds across headcount. Meanwhile, HBR (2025) reports that over 25% of meetings create “meeting hangovers”, draining focus and productivity long after they end.
At a macro level, research by McKinsey (2024, 2025) shows that companies whose top teams exhibit strong trust, communication, and decision-making are twice as likely to achieve above-median financial performance. In contrast, a dysfunctional team typically operates at only 60–70% of its potential, a 30–40% efficiency gap that ripples across the organisation through delays, conflict, and disengagement.
From individual change to systemic transformation
Kets de Vries (2015) observed that while one-on-one executive coaching can spark insight, behavioural change often fades when leaders return to the same environment. Team coaching, by contrast, embeds transformation within the system.
Leadership group coaching sessions create what Kets de Vries calls a “transitional space” — a psychologically safe environment where teams can surface unspoken dynamics and experiment with new ways of relating. Within this arena of authenticity and vulnerability, trust and collaboration can replace defensiveness and posturing. Through shared reflection and accountability, it creates a ripple effect of change that permeates the culture (CCL, 2021).
The mechanisms behind lasting change
The psychodynamic approach explores not only what leaders do, but why they do it. Beneath rational decision-making lie unconscious motivations and relational patterns, often rooted in early life experiences. These invisible forces shape leadership behaviours and team dynamics, from rivalry and dependency to avoidance or control.
According to Kets de Vries & Cheak (2014), understanding these unconscious processes strengthens empathy, self-awareness, and perspective-taking, the foundations of emotionally intelligent leadership. Bringing these patterns to light allows teams to transform destructive cycles into adaptive collaboration.
The mechanisms of change include:
- Trust and containment: Creating psychological safety to handle tension constructively, serving also as a precondition for collaboration and innovation.
- Self and systemic insight: Recognising how personal and collective histories influence behaviour and team patterns.
- Shared accountability: Turning individual reflection into collective responsibility, leading to collective alignment, breaking down silos and embedding shared accountability.
- Adaptive problem-solving: Developing the capacity to identify triggers, manage conflict, problem solve and learn dynamically in real time.
Together, these form the invisible infrastructure of high-performance teams.
A case study: From conflict to cohesion
A mid-sized Belgian health foods company, long successful but now facing market turbulence, found its executive team fragmented by conflict and mistrust. The CEO, Emma, felt like “a mother managing adolescents who refused to grow up.”
KDVI facilitated a psychodynamic team coaching process using its Team Compass framework. Diagnostics revealed high individual commitment but low team cohesion. Through interviews and storytelling, members explored how their personal histories shaped current dynamics.
For instance, Emma’s “mothering” instinct, rooted in her family background, kept the team dependent. John, the perfectionistic Head of R&D, recognised how defensiveness toward a colleague mirrored childhood patterns of seeking approval from a demanding father. In this relationship with Julie, the Marketing head, her very high standards triggered anger and defensiveness in him. Paul, the CFO had a childhood marked of conflict between his parents which ended in their divorce. As a result, he really disliked conflict, and his automatic response to conflict between John and Julie is to withdraw into the finance tasks and disengage. As these stories surfaced, empathy replaced judgment, and the team began viewing conflict as valuable data rather than dysfunction.
The process revealed how interpersonal tensions between R&D and Marketing were echoing across departments, creating organisational silos. With new awareness, the team introduced cross-functional projects and redefined decision norms to rebuild trust and collaboration.
In Emma’s words: “We became a team of adults again, still human, still imperfect, but aligned and energised.”
From insight to organisational impact
What made this intervention transformative was the integration of psychodynamic insight with systemic action. The team’s new awareness translated into structural change: clearer communication, cross-functional collaboration, and stronger accountability. Therefore, the true ROI of team coaching lies not just in productivity metrics but in the creation of psychological ownership: leaders who can think systemically, manage emotions, and role-model resilience.
In our work at KDVI, we’ve observed that this transformation unfolds at three levels:
- Individual: Deeper self-awareness, emotional intelligence, confidence, and authentic contribution.
- Team: Enhanced communication, collaboration, trust, and shared purpose.
- Organisation: A culture of learning, adaptability, and accountability that sustains performance and alignment.
Conclusion
The financial benefits of team coaching are compelling such as improved retention, engagement, and execution. Yet its deeper value lies in something less tangible but more enduring: the psychological reconfiguration of leadership.
In an age of volatility and complexity, emotional intelligence, empathy, and collaboration have become the hardest currency of organisational success. By transforming relationships from the inside out, psychodynamic team coaching enables leaders to navigate not only strategic challenges but also the emotional terrain of transformation, building teams that are not just effective, but truly alive.
References
American University. The ROI of Executive Coaching
Centre for Creative Leadership (2021). Future of Corporate Coaching.
FMI (2018). Executive Coaching: Driving Real Results for Leaders in the Built Environment.
Gallup (2024). State of the Global Workplace Report.
HBR (2025). The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers.
ICF (2009). ICF/PwC Global Coaching Client Study.
ICF (2024). Coaching Statistics: The ROI of Coaching.
Kets de Vries, M.F.R. & Cheak, A. (2014). The Psychodynamic Approach. In In P. Northouse (Ed.), Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed., pp. 363-396).
Kets de Vries, M.F.R. (2015). Leadership Group Coaching in Action: The Zen of Creating High Performance Teams. Academy of Management Executive.
McKinsey (2025) Demystifying top-team performance: a CEO guide.
McKinsey (2024) Cracking the code of team effectiveness.
PMI (2018). Pulse of the profession.
SHRM (2025). Closing the Skills Gap Starts with a Culture of Learning.