Distributed leadership and micropolitics

The theories used to describe and explain educational leadership are subject to change as interests and priorities unfold. In the 21st century, distributed leadership has become increasingly fashionable as scholars, policy-makers and practitioners regard it as an appropriate way to lead and manage schools and other educational organisations. This model provides the potential for principals to share leadership, partly to reduce workloads and partly to empower and develop teachers. In the version of the model promulgated in the global north, distribution is seen as ‘emergent’, with principals nurturing a climate to encourage leadership initiatives that may arise anywhere in the organisation. A contrasting version, sometimes encouraged or mandated in centralised systems, is allocative distribution where tasks are given to teachers, notably senior and middle leaders, in a process often indistinguishable from delegation (Bush and Ng, 2019).

Micropolitics, a model pioneered by Eric Hoyle (1982) in the 1980s, is based on the assumption that conflict is endemic in organisations, as participants seek to promote and defend their interests, both personal and professional. Interest groups arise, perhaps linked to subjects, and compete for supremacy within schools. Conflicts are usually resolved through the exercise of power and it is principals, of course, who usually have the most power in schools. This model has become much less prominent in the new millennium, perhaps because it is seen as unduly cynical in portraying staff in professional organisations as pursuing conflict rather than consensus.

Mor Hodaya and Izhak Berkovich provide a rare contribution to distributed leadership theory by aligning it with micropolitics. They claim that distributed leadership largely adopts an apolitical outlook, with a limited focus on how it links with power. The authors adopted a multiple case-study design, with four Israeli secondary schools. Because they are generally larger and more complex than primary schools, they are ‘ideal sites’ for exploring distributed leadership. Their data indicate ‘imperfect’ distribution, noting that principals exerted control through ‘veto power’. They claim that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for example, tends to promote distributed leadership. They conclude that policy makers wishing to promote distributed leadership should foster context-specific supportive conditions.

Joan Andres Traver-Marti and her colleagues also focus on distributed leadership, in the context of Spanish inclusive schools. They define inclusive schools as those which are committed to ensuring that all students benefit from equal access to quality education. They also adopted a multiple case-study design, with four public infant and primary schools in four different regions of Spain. Through their participatory action research projects, they claim that the four management teams followed inclusive and democratic leadership practices, similar to what is understood as distributed leadership. They conclude that management teams are key to developing inclusive education, by fostering collaboration, shared vision and collective decision-making.

A central question in understanding distributed leadership is ‘to whom is leadership distributed’, although this also assumes a deliberate rather than an inadvertent process. In many settings, particularly where distribution may be characterised as allocative, it is senior leadership figures who are the recipients of distributed responsibilities and/or tasks. Jeanne Ho and her colleagues examine the role of vice-principals in Singapore, through the twin lens of role ambiguity and conflict. The authors’ research focused on vice-principals’ understanding and performance of their leadership roles. They conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 vice-principals, from both primary and secondary schools. They show that vice-principals require clear boundaries, so they can understand the legitimacy of their behaviours. They conclude that vice-principals in Singapore have only ‘bounded empowerment’, constrained by the expectations of their principals.

Middle leaders may also be key players in the distribution process, especially in respect of subject leadership. Geva Iftach and Orly Shapira-Lishchinsky examine some of the ethical dilemmas experienced by mid-level leaders in Israeli high schools and districts. Their volunteer sample comprised 30 participants on an MA Educational Leadership programme, who took part in role-play simulations. They report that inter-personal simulations featured the most narratives discussed by the participants, requiring them to navigate multiple conflicting values. Mid-level leaders have to engage at several levels, senior leaders, teacher and students, which the authors describe as ‘extremely challenging’.

The next two articles in this issue both address aspects of gendered leadership. First, Aliya Kuzhabekova adopted a bibliometric approach to review papers on women and educational leadership published from 1975 to 2020. She examined the research reported in Web of Science sources, a total of 823 papers. Significantly, three-fifths (61%) of these sources relate to higher education and fewer than two-fifths (39%) to schools. The journals in which these papers are published range widely but include only two specialising in educational leadership, Educational Management, Administration and Leadership (EMAL) (26 entries) and Educational Administration Quarterly (14). This illustrates the limitations of reviews based only on Web of Science, as most educational leadership journals are listed only in Scopus, not Web of Science. However, the article does produce helpful insights into the nature of this important sub-field. The author concludes that the papers included in the review represent Western and anglophone bias, neglecting indigenous theories and methods.

The second gendered leadership article, by Raymond Tangonyire, discusses the issues arising in a male-led basic (5–15) girls’ school in Ghana. The new head followed a retired female head and his appointment by the Ghana Education Service generated opposition from teachers, parents and alumnae, including the recently retired head. This single case-study featured 23 participants, representing different groups, current and previous heads, teachers, pupils, parents, the parent–teacher association chair, the school management committee chair, the circuit supervisor, and alumnae. The author reports that loyalty to ‘gender walls’ reflects a desire to keep women heads in girls’ schools, showing that Ghana remains a traditional society.

Instructional leadership is another model that has grown in significance in the 21st century but it still requires more theorisation and empirical underpinning. Haim Shaked contributes to both these aspects with his paper on the knowledge required to implement this model. He interviewed 38 Israeli principals to establish their perceived knowledge needs. A significant finding is that these principals were not concerned about their subject knowledge gaps, arguing that it did not impair their ability to observe classes, a central dimension of instructional leadership. He concludes that principals need to know how to manage the instructional programme and that this is independent of specific subject knowledge, a judgement that would be worth exploring in other national contexts.

Donnie Adams and his colleagues provide a systematic review of the literature on educational leadership and management in Malaysia. Following various filters, the authors identified 328 articles for inclusion in their review, of which 47% (155) were published in Malay and thus not readily accessible to international scholars. They found that most (75%) of all sources were published since 2015, perhaps stimulated by the impetus given to leadership by the 2013 Malaysia Education Blueprint. Significantly, most scholars used Western models to guide their research, rather than developing context-specific approaches.

School and college governors in most parts of the UK are volunteers, carrying out their important roles without remuneration. These volunteers join governing boards that are responsible for overseeing the institution's performance. Colin Forrest, Ron Hill and Chris James discuss the growing impetus to pay governors, for example, in English academy schools and the UK college sector, both of which offer complex environments for governance, often with very substantial budgets. The authors explore several aspects of this issue, including who should be paid, and for what, and the level of any payment. They conclude by acknowledging that consideration of payment for governors is a ‘very thorny issue’.

One of the significant changes in the field over the past 20 years has been the rise of leadership, and the decline of management, in the discourse of school and college organisation. More than 90% of EMAL submissions now address one or more aspects of leadership. Some 15 years ago (Bush 2008), I asked whether this change was purely semantic or represented a substantive change in theory, policy and practice. When decentralisation to the school level occurred, in England and elsewhere, there was understandable interest in the functional aspects of management, notably finance and human resources, that were devolved to schools and required principals to develop new skills sets. As these functions became established, and new roles such as bursar or business manager emerged, there was a renewed focus on the professional dimensions of leadership, hence the continuing shift away from management.

Melissa Tuytens and her colleagues provide what is now quite a rare contribution to educational management scholarship with their article on strategic human resource management (HRM) in Flemish primary and secondary schools. They focus on five HRM practices, recruitment and selection, assignment, evaluation, rewards and development, and their alignment with strategic planning. They conducted a very large-scale qualitative study, with 194 interviews in 24 schools, supplemented by observations and documents. They report that most schools were not strategic in their HRM practices, as the five practices were generally not aligned.

A second contribution from Flanders comes from Lore Bellemans and Geert Devos, who explore the self-efficacy of primary school principals. They interviewed 23 such principals for up to 90 minutes and analysed the data thematically. Half of the participants discussed success experiences as sources of self-efficacy and confidence, including small issues such as compliments from colleagues. A second important source of self-efficacy was professional development, including keeping up to date with the literature. They conclude that principals should learn to value small successes and that shared leadership can be important in developing self-efficacy, notably through verbal encounters.

The final paper in this issue, by Xiaofang Wang and Jocelyn Wong, examines teacher leaders’ brokerage practice in China in the context of a school–university partnership. They studied the work of 10 teacher leaders, master teachers, backbone teachers, and others, in two primary schools, a total of 20 participants. The authors found that brokerage can positively impact their own development as well as colleagues’ learning, adding that teacher leaders are empowered to lead, partly through their teaching expertise but also because of the managerial positions they hold. The authors conclude that brokerage is essential for teacher leadership and may be enhanced by their formal managerial roles.