The enduring popularity of distributed leadership: Professional participation or task allocation?

Distributed leadership remains a popular model, widely discussed and adopted by policymakers and educational leaders. Many EMAL authors utilise it to frame their research while some governments advocate it as a preferred approach for school leaders. The attractions of this approach are clear. By spreading leadership beyond senior positions, it seems to increase leadership density while empowering teachers to participate in school decision making. Theory development from leading scholars, such as Peter Gronn, Alma Harris and James Spillane, suggests that distribution is an emergent influence process, unconstrained by formal roles. Leadership may emerge from any part of the organisation and be lateral and upwards, not just downwards through the hierarchy. The model is an uneasy mix of normative and descriptive, and evidence of its application suggests that, in practice, distribution is circumscribed.

Malaysia provides an important example of a modified version of distributed leadership being prescribed by government. The Malaysia Education Blueprint strongly encourages distribution but with two important caveats. First, it is focused only on staff holding formal senior or middle leadership roles, not on teachers or other stakeholders. Second, its scope is limited in this highly centralised society. Both ‘who’ and ‘what’ are very different from the normative model presented by international theorists. This has led some authors to describe this modified model as ‘allocative leadership’ (Bolden et al., 2009, Bush and Ng, 2019), a process little different from delegation.

Donnie Adams, Alma Harris and their colleagues provide a timely longitudinal overview of the knowledge base of distributed leadership over the 35 years from 1988 to 2023. The authors identify the key features of scholarship on this model, including its scale and scope, geographical distribution, key scholars and its underlying intellectual structure. It offers a roadmap for future research, and its main contribution is to codify this substantial body of knowledge about this widely adopted approach to leadership.

Distributed leadership is often connected to beneficial outcomes for teachers, and Xiaorong Ma and Russ Marion examine how it links to teacher job satisfaction in China. The authors draw on 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) data, which included 3716 teachers from 193 schools. Their findings show that distributed leadership has positive direct and indirect effects on teacher job satisfaction, mediated by teacher well-being and work motivation. The article thus provides support for the ambitious claims sometimes made for this model.

It is difficult to imagine distributed leadership being effective without the positive support of teachers, and teacher leadership has emerged as a distinct but connected model. Teacher leaders influence colleagues within and beyond the classroom, regardless of whether they hold a formal leadership position. Harmen Schapp and his colleagues examined this phenomenon with 16 teacher leaders in Netherlands secondary schools. They found three patterns of teacher leadership, empowered, struggling and demotivated, and struggling but with high motivation. The authors conclude that teacher leadership may have negative consequences instead of, or as well as, positive outcomes.

Sara Francis and her colleagues discuss the role of formal teacher leaders in New York, linked to a City initiative called Teacher Career Pathways. They indicate that schools with formal teacher leaders show greater improvement than those without such positions, a significant finding. They attribute their success, in part, to their roles as boundary spanners and network enhancers, suggesting that teacher leaders may operate beyond the school as well as within it.

Teacher leadership evolved in partly decentralised contexts, such as the Netherlands and New York, but Adem Cilek and his colleagues explore its impact in the very centralised setting of Turkiye. The authors surveyed 1240 teachers and found a positive direct link between principal support, and teacher resilience, with teacher leadership, as well as indirect links through teacher work engagement. This article thus further supports the notion that context is an important variable in successful teacher leadership enactment.

Piety Runhaar and her colleagues discuss the related notion of team learning in the Netherlands’ schools. They examined the notion of team-based human resource management (HRM). Their surveys of 600 teachers show that team-based HRM contributes to team learning, notably in respect of information processing and boundary spanning. The implications are significant for both teacher teams and senior leader teams.

The third article in this issue featuring boundary spanning, by Xin Zheng and her colleagues, links the notion to teachers’ interdisciplinary teaching. Their longitudinal study of a Chinese primary school explored the boundaries teachers encounter when implementing theme-based learning. They found that principals act as primary boundary spanners while subject leaders serve as pioneers. In implementing interdisciplinary learning, leading by example. The authors conclude that principals and subject leaders play distinct but complementary roles in implementing curriculum reform.

Instructional leadership is another popular model, as evidence has accumulated indicating its potential impact on student learning outcomes. Mehmet Bellibas and his colleagues examine this relationship in the specific context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The authors examined 2022 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data that includes 8715 teachers and 21,176 students. They found that instructional leadership is indirectly related to student maths achievement, mediated by teacher professional development, leading to new teaching strategies and activated student cognition. The article is a significant contribution to literature on instructional leadership in the Gulf region.

Engin Karadag and Gulsum Sertel also focus on the impact of educational leadership on students’ achievement. Their meta-analysis compared 348 journal articles and dissertations, and they found that educational leadership has a medium-level effect on student achievement. Perhaps surprisingly, the authors’ analysis showed that leadership effects were greater in collectivist, rather than individualistic, cultures. They also note that the most influential model was instructional leadership, consistent with the Bellibas et al. paper mentioned above. Another significant outcome was that leadership effects diminished during the COVID-19 crisis.

The next two papers also relate to aspects of crisis leadership, an aspect of the ELM field that has inevitably grown since the COVID-19 pandemic. Kjersti Welle and Ann Gunnulfsen review 51 articles from 14 countries about how school leaders responded to this and other crises, with most (32) focused on COVID-19. The authors identify four dilemmas for leaders, one of which relates to the balance between individual power and responsibility, and shared leadership, a constant challenge that is heightened during periods of uncertainty.

Zobi Mazhabi investigated leadership attributes and strategies during times of crisis in four rural public primary schools in Indonesia. The author adopted a narrative enquiry approach with the four school principals through in-depth interviews. Their within-school strategies included employing a home visit programme and distributing leadership responsibilities among school members. A complementary inter-school strategy foregrounded facilitating connections and establishing strategic partnerships with the local community.

While leadership models are often evaluated for their efficacy in improving student outcomes, ethical dimensions of leadership may also be foregrounded. Karen Stansberry Beard explores ethical decision-making in the USA, linked to sensemaking. The author introduces the Sensemaking and Engagement in Ethical Decision-Making (SEED) Framework, with five distinct phases aligned with professional standards. She claims that this SEED Framework provides a useful decision-making tool for leadership preparation.

Yasmin Abd El Qader and Pascale Benoliel discuss teacher professional commitment in the Israeli Arab education system, linked to notions of directive and participative leadership. They surveyed 426 leaders and teachers in 71 high schools and found that professional commitment mediated the relationship between leadership and teachers’ academic emphasis. The authors conclude that teacher commitment helps to build leadership capacity and promote a positive school learning environment.

As well as their instructional leadership role, principals also have responsibility for school discipline. Amy McLaughlin and her colleagues examine how principals navigate the challenges of discipline decision-making in a north‒west US state. They interviewed 50 school administrators, who identified five ‘domains of tension’; policy constraints, resource limitations, relationship management, value conflicts and discretionary restrictions. The authors conclude that systemic changes are required to support principals in making socially just disciplinary decisions.

While schools are traditionally regarded as ‘prime institutions’ within education systems, there is a growing emphasis on inter-school collaboration, as the next two articles illustrate. Koksal Banoglu and his colleagues explore this phenomenon with 62 school principals in Istanbul, informed by social network analysis. The authors’ findings offer a mixed picture, with older principals more likely to seek advice on both instructional and administrative issues. They recommend the adoption of tailored mentorship programmes for novice and moderately experienced principals, to promote a holistic approach to school management.

Education groups are an emerging feature of educational leadership in China, and Pinyan Lin examines the notion of education collectives in this context. The author explores how power and authority are redistributed within the collectives’ hierarchical structures. She concludes by discussing the diverse potential relationships that emerge between and amongst schools, districts and government.

Ulf Leo and his colleagues examine the role of group coaching within national school leadership development programmes in Norway and Sweden. The authors adopted a qualitative case study design, and data were collected through interviews, observations and surveys. They focus on how school leaders experience group coaching in addressing leadership challenges. They report on differences across the two national programmes but conclude that group coaching supports principals in reflecting, understanding and acting on the leadership challenges.

Ghana is one of the leading African countries in respect of knowledge production on school leadership. Philip Dare and his colleagues provide an overview of empirical studies on headteacher leadership in this West African context, from 1994 to 2022. They analysed 23 peer-reviewed papers and found that transformational leadership was foregrounded. They note that cultural factors may inhibit knowledge transfer and point to a trend towards self-directed and informal professional development among school heads. The Ghana Education Service has subsequently piloted a structured educational leadership programme, for school and system leaders, so future reviews may note a greater degree of formal learning.

Aysha Alnuaimi and colleagues assess school leadership and inclusion within early childhood education in the UAE, drawing on the heuristic inclusive education framework. The authors surveyed 151 public school leaders to examine their perceptions of the implementation of inclusive education for all children. Their results showed ambivalence amongst the participants, but the authors report a positive relationship between heuristic leadership and inclusive practices.

The final paper in this issue, by Anindya Kundu, applies social science perspectives to educational leadership, based on interviews with 12 leading education scholars. The findings surface tangible and actionable strategies for leaders to move beyond management to address what the author describes as the inequitable status quo of educational outcomes. Leveraging political capital is seen as important to address barriers and challenges to equity.