The Practitioner’s Handbook of Team Coaching

1 Constructive-developmental theory

A lens for team coaching

Sandra Hayes and Nancy Popp

Constructivism and developmentalism have been the two “big ideas” influencing almost every facet of intellectual life for over a century (Kegan, 1982). Thus, constructive-developmental theory (CDT) (Kegan, 1980, 1982, 1994; Popp & Portnow, 2001) brings together these two essential lines of human development: (1) constructivism, the notion that individuals construct their reality through their engagement with their social and environmental surround, i.e., that they create meaning from their experience; and (2) developmentalism, the notion that this process of meaning-constructing evolves through qualitatively different stages of increasing complexity. The ...