Contested leadership: Negotiating teacher leadership in a highly centralized school system through school-based reform

Abstract

This qualitative multiple case study investigated how teacher leadership was negotiated and enacted within a donor-funded school reform in Lebanon's highly centralized public education system. Drawing on interviews with principals and focus groups with teacher leaders, the study showed that leadership distribution unfolded through ongoing negotiation over roles, authority, and professional space within school teams. These processes were shaped by agency tensions, institutional inertia, and micro-political resistance. While the reform created temporary openings for participation, these often remained structurally bounded and did not amount to genuine redistribution of power. In doing so, the study suggests that in highly centralized systems, distributed leadership is not simply shared by design but negotiated, provisional, and vulnerable to reversal. Although some teachers claimed forms of rightful presence, the absence of corresponding legal and cultural shifts meant that teacher leadership remained fragile, aspirational, and largely enacted within the cracks rather than at the core of the system.

Keywords

Teacher leadership school reform distributed leadership school leadership educational policy

Introduction

Over the past two decades, school leadership has been widely recognized as a cornerstone of educational quality and equity, with international research linking effective leadership to student achievement, teacher motivation, and institutional improvement (Ghamrawi, 2016, 2023; OECD, 2016). As systems respond to pressures such as accountability reforms, inclusive education, and digital transformation, leadership has shifted from a purely top-down managerial role toward more collaborative and distributed forms. Within this shift, distributed leadership has become a prominent paradigm, viewing leadership not as the preserve of formal administrators but as a shared practice enacted by multiple actors across the school system (Harris, 2013; Shal et al., 2024; Spillane, 2006).

Within the distributed leadership framework, teacher leadership has gained particular prominence (Nguyen et al., 2019). Teachers are increasingly positioned as change agents, capable of contributing to school development through pedagogical innovation, peer collaboration, and participatory decision-making (York-Barr and Duke, 2004). As such, teacher leadership is often hailed as a lever for sustainable school improvement—an approach that capitalizes on teachers’ frontline expertise to build collective capacity and support instructional coherence (Lieberman and Miller, 2011; Wenner and Campbell, 2017). However, the successful enactment of teacher leadership is not automatic; rather, it hinges on a range of contextual and relational factors (Chen, 2025; Ghamrawi, 2013a, 2013b).

Emerging scholarship underscores that teacher leadership enactment is highly contingent upon leadership styles, organizational culture, and the distribution of authority within schools (Fairman and Mackenzie, 2015; Nguyen et al., 2019). Among these, teacher professional agency plays a critical explanatory role in shaping whether teachers can translate distributed arrangements into enacted influence (Hilal and Akar, 2023). Defined as the capacity of teachers to make choices and take action within and across structures, agency is both enabled and constrained by institutional logics, power dynamics, and discursive norms (Ghamrawi et al., 2024a, 2024b; Priestley et al., 2015). In highly centralized or compliance-driven systems, school leaders often retain tight control over decision-making, limiting the space in which teachers can operate as leaders. This tension—between authority and agency, between command and collaboration—lies at the heart of many reform efforts that seek to shift schools toward more participatory and decentralized models of leadership (Woods, 2016).

Recent evidence from highly hierarchical Chinese school contexts similarly suggests that teacher leadership tends to develop through informal, relational routes rather than through formal delegation. In a Chinese hierarchical school setting, professional learning communities were found to strengthen informal teacher leadership by legitimizing peer influence, creating structured opportunities for collaborative problem-solving, and widening teachers’ room to act within tight organizational boundaries (Lee and Ip, 2023). These insights reinforce that in centralized systems, the question is not whether teacher leadership is promoted rhetorically but whether school-level routines create actionable space for influence to be exercised and recognized.

In Lebanon's public education system, these tensions are particularly acute. School principals have long been characterized in research as “school keepers” rather than “school leaders” due to their limited decision-making power and bureaucratic mandates (El-Amine, 2018; Ghamrawi, 2018). Leadership in public schools has historically been exercised through rigid hierarchies, leaving little room for teacher voice, innovation, or collaboration. In this context, the enactment of teacher leadership becomes both a structural and cultural challenge, complicated further by longstanding norms of compliance and limited institutional autonomy.

To date, few studies have explored how teacher leadership might be cultivated within highly centralized education systems—particularly when reform initiatives explicitly attempt to disrupt traditional hierarchical arrangements and introduce more participatory forms of leadership (Abbaspour et al., 2024; Shaari et al., 2018). This study responds to that gap by examining how school-based reform initiatives aimed at redistributing decision-making authority have opened up new, yet contested, spaces for teacher leadership. Specifically, it investigates how school leaders and teachers navigated the shifting dynamics of leadership roles within institutional environments historically resistant to shared authority. In such contexts, teacher leadership is not simply implemented but actively negotiated, often giving rise to tensions around power, professional agency, and structural constraints.

While grounded in the Lebanese context, the study offers insights of broader significance for schooling systems characterized by rigid hierarchies, centralized control, and limited teacher agency. It contributes to a deeper understanding of how leadership is not merely assigned or enacted but actively negotiated and contested within institutional constraints. Illuminating the dynamics of authority, agency, and professional space, the study serves as both a conceptual and practical lens through which other tightly governed education systems may reimagine leadership as a shared, developmental, and politically situated practice. The study was guided by the following research questions:

How did school principals and teacher leaders negotiate leadership roles, responsibilities, and authority during the school-based reform initiative?

How did the structural and cultural conditions of the centralized public school system shape or constrain the enactment of teacher leadership?

Context of the study

Teacher professional agency does not emerge in isolation—it is situated within the sociopolitical and institutional architecture of schools, where it is constantly negotiated, shaped, and at times constrained. In Lebanon's public school system, school principals have historically been framed less as pedagogical leaders and more as administrative custodians, tasked with executing top-down directives with limited autonomy or authority (El-Amine, 2018; Ghamrawi, 2011). This compliance-oriented leadership culture has left little room for shared decision-making or the development of teacher leadership within schools. Yet, as scholarship on professional agency suggests, the ability of teachers to act agentically is often contingent upon the degree of space and support afforded to them by school leaders (Honingh et al., 2017; Schaap et al., 2019).

Against this backdrop, a National Leadership Development Program II (LDP) was launched under the auspices of a World Bank-funded education reform initiative, aiming to challenge entrenched leadership norms and promote distributed leadership practices. Although Lebanon's public school system includes more than 1200 schools, only 360 were selected to participate in this externally funded intervention—reflecting the pilot nature and donor-driven scope of the reform. For the first time in the public education system, principals were invited to engage in a year-long professional development initiative that not only positioned them as central actors in school improvement but also mandated the inclusion of 3–4 school team members—typically teachers or middle leaders—thus signaling a shift toward collaborative leadership. Operationally, this shift was enacted through program design rather than assumption: the reform required principals to work with a school-based team (3–4 teachers/middle leaders) to codiagnose needs, codevelop the School Improvement Plan (SIP), and collectively implement SIP actions tied to a discretionary budget that was conditional on external approval. In other words, the intended mechanism for changing principal–teacher relations was the routinization of joint work around planning, resourcing, and decision-making, making collaboration a required practice rather than an optional disposition. This policy architecture matters for interpretation because it created a temporary governance “opening” inside a system whose formal authority lines remained centralized.

In one way or another, the structure and emphasis of the training reflected donor priorities, embedding expectations for system-wide transformation within localized implementation. Crucially, each participating school received a discretionary budget to be spent on a codeveloped SIP, conditional on approval by the training body. This unprecedented financial empowerment served as a structural lever to advance school improvement through participatory leadership, fostering collective decision-making and strengthening teacher agency.

Yet, as teachers and principals collaboratively developed and implemented their SIPs, tensions surfaced around the distribution of power, responsibilities, and voice. School leaders found themselves in a dual and unfamiliar position—granted unprecedented autonomy to make decisions and manage funds, while simultaneously expected to share leadership and involve others in decision-making. At the same time, teachers had to navigate their emerging leadership roles within institutional cultures that had long overlooked or undervalued their contributions to school governance. This study examines teacher leadership enactment dynamics, tracing how school leaders negotiated space for teacher agency in a system historically devoid of such practices. Drawing on the concept of agency tensions—which arise from discrepancies between perceived and actual opportunities for professional enactment (Kessels, 2012; Schaap et al., 2019)—the study probes the conflicts, contestations, and renegotiations that surfaced within these school leadership teams.

Theoretically, these tensions can be understood as arising from competing expectations, opaque role boundaries, and institutionalized norms of authority and compliance (DeRue and Ashford, 2010; Seashore Louis et al., 2010). Leadership, in this context, plays a pivotal role in either mitigating or exacerbating such tensions through the ways in which it communicates task boundaries, reallocates power, and constructs the conditions for teacher agency (Carson et al., 2007). By focusing on both the structural conditions of leadership reform and the relational micropolitics within school teams, this study explores the complex interplay between authority and agency, command and collaboration, coleadership and co-option, and parallel leadership trajectories versus power struggles.

Two of the study's authors served as facilitators within the LDP II and directly supervised the SIP process across multiple schools. Their dual positionality enabled a unique vantage point to capture the lived realities of school leaders and teacher leaders as they navigated this experimental governance space. This embedded engagement allowed the study to trace how leadership spaces were coconstructed, resisted, and reimagined—revealing the fragile, and at times frictional, architecture of distributed leadership and teacher leadership enactment in Lebanon's public education system.

Conceptual framework

This study is anchored in an ecological understanding of teacher professional agency, positioning agency as teachers’ capacity to make purposeful choices, take initiative, and shape pedagogical and organizational practice within the constraints and affordances of their working environment (Priestley et al., 2015; Vähäsantanen, 2015). Rather than advancing a single formal theory, the study adopts a conceptual framework that brings together teacher professional agency, principal mediation of professional space, agency tensions, and contested zones as complementary analytic lenses for examining how teacher leadership is negotiated in a highly centralized school system. Within this framing, teacher leadership is treated not primarily as a formal role but as a situated expression of agency that becomes visible when teachers exert influence through collaboration, innovation, and shared responsibility for improvement (Lieberman and Miller, 2011; Wenner and Campbell, 2017; York-Barr and Duke, 2004). This conceptualization aligns teacher leadership with the enacted, relational dimensions of professional identity, emphasizing that leadership is more likely to be claimed and sustained when teachers recognize it as part of who they are professionally and when expectations and recognition are socially and organizationally supported (Abu-Shawish and Ghamrawi, 2025; Chen, 2025; DeRue and Ashford, 2010). Here, identity is treated as the meaning-making and legitimacy layer that shapes whether leadership is claimed and recognized, whereas teacher leadership itself is treated as the enacted influence practices through which teachers shape improvement work.

For conceptual clarity, the study distinguishes among agency, identity, and leadership rather than using them interchangeably. Teacher professional agency refers to capacity and exercise of action: teachers’ perceived and enacted ability to make choices, initiate action, and influence practice within structural and cultural constraints (Priestley et al., 2015; Vähäsantanen, 2015). Teacher identity refers to meaning and self-understanding: the relatively durable, yet evolving, sense teachers hold about “who I am” and “what I am responsible for” professionally, including whether leadership is seen as legitimate, desirable, or appropriate for the self (DeRue and Ashford, 2010). Teacher leadership is treated in this study as enacted influence in practice: the observable ways teachers lead others and contribute to school improvement through collaboration, innovation, and shared responsibility, regardless of formal title (Wenner and Campbell, 2017; York-Barr and Duke, 2004). In other words, agency is the capacity that makes action possible, identity shapes whether leadership is claimed and recognized, and teacher leadership is the form that agency takes when it is enacted as influence in school improvement work. Accordingly, teacher leadership is analyzed here primarily as a practice-based enactment (what teachers do and how they influence), while agency and identity are used to explain why such enactments become possible, constrained, claimed, or withdrawn in centralized school settings. To avoid conceptual overlap, references to “leadership identity” in the analysis therefore denote teachers’ legitimacy claims and sense of self-as-leader, whereas references to “teacher leadership” denote influence enacted through practice.

Because agency is always exercised under conditions of power, policy, and culture, the study further draws on the notion of “agency tensions” to illuminate the contradictions that arise when teachers’ motivation, responsibility, and improvement-oriented intentions collide with structural, cultural, or relational barriers in centralized systems (Billett, 2009; Schaap et al., 2019). In the Lebanese public school context, such tensions are likely to surface when reform-driven innovation encounters rigid bureaucratic procedures, narrow role definitions, conservative staff cultures, and institutional routines that prioritize compliance over professional discretion (Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017). From this perspective, teacher leadership is read as a dynamic process that is continuously negotiated and recalibrated, rather than a stable attribute that teachers either possess or lack (Priestley et al., 2015; Wenner and Campbell, 2017).

School leadership is conceptualized here as a central mediating force that shapes teachers’ professional space and, by extension, the conditions under which agency can be enacted as leadership (Honingh et al., 2017; Leijen et al., 2020). In highly centralized settings, principals operate at the interface between reform expectations and bureaucratic control, which makes their leadership practices consequential for whether teacher participation becomes substantive influence or remains bounded participation (Jones and Charteris, 2017; Woods, 2016). Mediation is therefore understood in practical terms as the everyday work through which principals define and clarify roles, allocate decision rights, build relational trust, broker resources, manage accountability, and navigate equity and legitimacy concerns within the staff (Berkovich and Eyal, 2018; Hulpia and Devos, 2010; Seashore Louis et al., 2010). These practices can widen or restrict teachers’ room to act, shaping whether teacher leadership emerges as an enabled expression of agency, as a provisional accommodation, or as a fragile initiative vulnerable to reversal under bureaucratic pressure.

To capture how leadership is formed through interaction rather than merely distributed by design, the study also draws on the idea of schools as “contested zones” in which overlapping domains of authority and legitimacy are continually negotiated (Hanson, 1978, 2003; Shen and Xia, 2012). This lens directs attention to the micropolitics of reform enactment: moments where authority is tested, boundaries are disputed, voice is legitimized or muted, and responsibility is expanded without corresponding power. Such moments are especially salient in donor-funded initiatives that temporarily introduce participatory expectations into systems whose legal and cultural grammar remains centralized. In this sense, leadership is approached as a relational accomplishment that is claimed, granted, resisted, or withdrawn through interaction, rather than a stable property attached to formal positions (DeRue and Ashford, 2010). Relational leadership practices, including trust building, informal engagement, and coaching-oriented interactions, are therefore treated as key mechanisms through which professional space may be cultivated under constraint (Lipponen and Kumpulainen, 2011; Seashore Louis et al., 2010).

This combined framing is analytically useful because it connects three levels that the research questions require: (a) teachers’ action possibilities (ecological agency), (b) the school leader's everyday shaping of professional space (mediation), and (c) the micropolitical struggle through which authority and legitimacy are negotiated in practice (contested zones). Read together, the lenses prevent “agency” from becoming an abstract claim by showing where it is enabled or restricted, by whom, and through which interactions as reform routines collide with centralized governance.

In sum, this framework foregrounds a linked pathway that guides interpretation across the study: structural and cultural conditions shape teachers’ perceived professional space; principal practices mediate how that space is opened, protected, or restricted; and teacher leadership appears as the enacted expression of agency in improvement work, especially under the pressures and contradictions captured by agency tensions (Priestley et al., 2015; Schaap et al., 2019; Wenner and Campbell, 2017). This orientation keeps the analysis focused on how leadership becomes possible and contested in practice: how teachers come to lead, how principals enable or contain that leadership, and how centralized governance architectures and school micropolitics jointly determine whether teacher leadership expands, remains symbolic, or contracts once reform scaffolding recedes.

Figure 1 summarizes the study's conceptual framework and the relationships among its core constructs. It visually foregrounds teacher professional agency and its expression through teacher leadership, while showing how principals’ leadership practices mediate teachers’ professional space within contested zones, and how agency tensions (structural, cultural, and relational barriers) become salient under centralized governance conditions.

Figure 1.

Conceptual framework of the study.

Method

Research design

This study employed a qualitative multiple case study design (Yin, 2018) to explore how teacher leadership was enacted, contested, and negotiated within a school-based reform initiative in Lebanon's highly centralized public education system. Five public schools were treated as distinct cases, enabling comparison across sites while preserving contextual specificity. Anchored in an interpretive paradigm, the research examined how leadership roles and authority were constructed in practice as school teams engaged with the LDP, a national initiative promoting distributed leadership. Cases were purposefully selected from LDP-participating schools to ensure variation in geographic location (five governorates) and principals’ willingness to engage with the reform. Because the cases were drawn from the same public-school governance architecture and the same national reform intervention, the study anticipated substantial cross-case convergence in the structural conditions shaping leadership practice, while treating any differences as variations in intensity and local micropolitics rather than differences in the formal rules of the system. This design was chosen for its strength in capturing complex social phenomena in real-world contexts and tracing leadership dynamics across multiple embedded school settings (Stake, 2013; Tisdell et al., 2025).

Participants

This study was conducted in five public schools across five Lebanese governorates, all participating in the National LDP. Although the five schools differed by governorate and local community conditions, they operated under the same centralized public-school regulatory regime in which administrative procedures, approvals, and role expectations are largely standardized and dictated through formal directives. This shared governance environment meant that principals’ decision-making space, paperwork requirements, and accountability routines were not school-specific but system-defined, cascading across schools in similar ways. In addition, all participating principals and teacher leaders were enrolled in the same LDP structure and implemented SIPs under comparable training expectations and approval conditions, creating common reform routines across sites.

In each school, a leadership team was formed comprising the principal and four teachers, yielding a total of 25 participants: five principals and 20 teacher leaders. Schools were purposefully selected to ensure geographic diversity and principals’ willingness to engage with the reform. All principals had more than 20 years of combined experience in teaching and school leadership and were aged between 48 and 54 years. Teacher participants ranged in age from 26 to 46 years across the five schools, and all had worked in their respective schools for at least five years, providing strong institutional familiarity and continuity with the schools’ development trajectories.

To uphold ethical rigor and minimize bias associated with the researchers’ prior facilitation roles in the LDP, data collection responsibilities were deliberately crossed: each researcher-facilitator conducted interviews in schools previously supervised by the other. This arrangement reduced the influence of preexisting professional relationships on participants’ responses. Throughout data collection and analysis, both maintained reflexive field notes and held regular debriefing conversations to surface how their insider knowledge might shape questioning, rapport, and interpretation. Following formal approval from the Lebanese Ministry of Education and Higher Education and informed consent from principals and teachers, qualitative data were generated through semistructured individual interviews with the five principals and five focus group interviews with teacher leaders (one per school), enabling complementary perspectives on leadership dynamics, power redistribution, and teacher agency within the reform initiative.

Data collection

Data collection involved semistructured interviews with school principals and focus group discussions with teacher leaders from each participating school. For the school principals, these interviews explored their experiences with the enactment of teacher leadership during the implementation of the school-based reform initiative. Designed to generate rich, context-specific narratives, the interviews focused on how leadership roles were negotiated, tensions around authority emerged, and structural and cultural conditions shaped teacher agency (Tisdell et al., 2025). The semistructured format offered a consistent framework while allowing flexibility to probe deeper into principals’ individual experiences (Barbour, 2018).

To elicit concrete reform narratives rather than general perceptions, principals were invited to recount specific SIP episodes from initiation to closure, including: (a) how the SIP team was formed and roles were assigned; (b) one or two moments in which decision-making authority was negotiated (e.g., who proposed, who approved, and why); (c) an instance of bureaucratic interaction or delay (e.g., approvals, paperwork, or resource procurement); and (d) a moment of conflict, resistance, or trust-building within the school team. Probes invited participants to describe what happened, who was involved, what was decided, what constraints were encountered, and how the episode concluded. Open-ended questions prompted reflective insights into principals’ evolving responsibilities, their collaboration with teacher leaders, and the institutional dynamics that supported or constrained participatory leadership. Each session lasted 45–60 min, was recorded, transcribed verbatim, and translated into English for analysis. Collecting parallel accounts from principals and teacher leaders enabled comparison across role perspectives, allowing points of convergence and divergence in their narratives to be examined systematically during analysis.

To complement the individual interviews with school principals, five focus group interviews were conducted with the 20 participating teacher leaders—one group per school. Focus groups were selected as an appropriate method to access collective meaning-making and interactional insights that emerge through peer discussion (Krueger, 2014). These discussions explored how teachers interpreted their changing leadership responsibilities, navigated power dynamics with school leaders, and engaged with the structural and cultural conditions shaping their participation in school-based reform. Each session, lasting between 60 and 75 min, followed a semistructured protocol designed to promote open-ended dialogue while ensuring consistency across sites. This interactive format enabled participants to build on one another's perspectives, revealing both converging and diverging views on teacher leadership. The group setting also illuminated how agency was collaboratively negotiated, constrained, or enabled within the context of the reform initiative. Given the researchers’ prior roles as LDP facilitators, particular care was taken to stress the voluntary nature of participation, clarify that contributions would not affect school standing within the program, and invite critical views of the LDP and SIP in order to mitigate potential power imbalances and social desirability bias. To ensure focus groups generated episode-based reform narratives, teacher leaders were also asked to collectively reconstruct key SIP moments (e.g., an episode of role negotiation, an instance of peer resistance or micropolitical undermining, a bureaucratic blockage, and a moment of visible legitimacy or recognition), and to discuss how these episodes shaped their willingness and ability to enact leadership during and after the SIP period.

Data analysis

Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) oriented to the study's conceptual framework, which links teacher professional agency, principal mediation of teachers’ professional space, and teacher leadership enactment within contested zones and under conditions of agency tension (Hanson, 2003; Priestley et al., 2015; Schaap et al., 2019). The analysis was guided by the study's conceptual framework, with these constructs used as analytic lenses rather than as fixed variables to be tested. More specifically, the framework informed attention to how participants described teachers’ action possibilities, principals’ mediation of participation and decision-making space, moments of tension or constraint, and episodes in which authority, legitimacy, and leadership boundaries were negotiated in practice. The analysis followed four iterative stages that explicitly operationalized the framework as an analytic scaffold for within-case interpretation and cross-case comparison.

First, all interview and focus group transcripts were read repeatedly to support familiarization. During this stage, case memos were written for each school to capture (a) the most salient SIP episodes recounted, (b) the school-specific relational climate (e.g., trust and peer dynamics), and (c) early analytic hunches about how authority, participation, and legitimacy were being negotiated. These memos preserved case integrity while preparing the dataset for systematic comparison.

Second, transcripts were coded using a hybrid inductive–deductive strategy. Inductive codes stayed close to participants’ language to capture unanticipated meanings and locally situated dynamics. Deductive codes then applied a theoretically informed code family that operationalized the framework into traceable analytic categories. This deductive family included: (a) structural and cultural conditions shaping professional space (e.g., centralized approvals, administrative paperwork, role prescriptions, compliance norms, staff cultures); (b) principal mediation practices (e.g., role clarification, allocation of decision rights, trust-building, resource brokerage, accountability management, equity and legitimacy management); (c) teacher leadership enactments as practice-based influence (e.g., initiating SIP work, influencing peers, coordinating tasks, informal mentoring, collaborative problem-solving); (d) agency tensions (moments where responsibility and improvement intent collided with structural, cultural, or relational constraints, including fatigue, withdrawal, and perceptions of symbolic participation); and (e) contested-zone episodes, defined as narrative segments in which authority, legitimacy, voice, boundaries, or responsibility were explicitly negotiated, resisted, or reasserted (DeRue and Ashford, 2010; Hanson, 2003; Schaap et al., 2019). Coding was conducted systematically across principal and teacher datasets to enable structured comparison of role-positioned accounts.

Third, codes were clustered into candidate themes through constant comparison within and across cases. Within-case analysis traced how the focal practices unfolded in each school, examining how SIP routines interacted with local micropolitics and relational trust. Cross-case analysis then examined pattern recurrence across the five schools to determine whether themes reflected system-level bureaucratic conditions (expected to converge across public schools) or school-level variation in intensity (e.g., stronger peer resistance, weaker trust). Throughout, convergence and divergence between principal and teacher accounts were examined to strengthen interpretive credibility and to identify where narratives aligned, complemented, or contradicted one another.

Fourth, themes were refined through iterative return to the full dataset to check coherence, boundary clarity, and explanatory power. Theme refinement was guided by the framework's interpretive pathway: (1) how centralized structures and cultures shaped professional space, (2) how principals mediated that space in everyday practice, and (3) how teacher leadership emerged, narrowed, or reversed as enacted influence under conditions of agency tension within contested zones (Hanson, 2003; Priestley et al., 2015; Woods, 2016). During refinement, particular attention was given to sharpening distinctions among agency (capacity/opportunity to act), identity (legitimacy claims and professional self-understandings), and teacher leadership (enacted influence practices), so that constructs were not used interchangeably in reporting.

To enhance rigor and transparency, analytic decisions were documented through an audit trail (coding notes, memo iterations, and theme-development decisions). The researchers held regular debriefing conversations to surface how their insider knowledge of the LDP might shape analytic attention and interpretation, and they actively sought disconfirming evidence to avoid overgeneralization from dominant narratives.

Findings

Thematic analysis of the data generated two complementary sets of themes, one derived from school principal interviews (Table 1) and the other from teacher focus group discussions (Table 2). While both perspectives converged on key issues related to leadership distribution and agency, distinct insights emerged from each group. Across the five cases, participants described highly similar structural and bureaucratic conditions shaping leadership practice, including multilevel approvals, standardized administrative paperwork, limited school-level discretion, and strong compliance expectations. This cross-case consistency is unsurprising in a highly centralized public education system where formal procedures and role boundaries are largely system-prescribed and experienced similarly across schools. This cross-case similarity is consistent with the fact that all cases were public schools operating under the same bureaucratic governance regime and implementing the same reform routines through the same national training structure, making system-level constraints highly reproducible across sites. Accordingly, the Findings emphasize patterns that were recurrent across cases, while noting that interschool variation appeared primarily in the degree of relational trust, the level of peer resistance, and the local micropolitical climate rather than in the overarching governance constraints.

Table 1.

Thematic analysis of principals’ interviews.

Themes	Subthemes	Frequency
Reframing Leadership Boundaries	- Shifting from managerial to participatory roles; - Redefining formal authority structures	5 4
Negotiating Authority and Trust	- Building relational trust; - Sharing power and decision-making; - Managing vulnerability	5 4 3
Enabling and Constraining Agency	- Enabling agency through autonomy and resources; - Structural constraints and institutional inertia	4 5
Professional Identity and Legitimacy	- Emerging self-perceptions as leaders; - Recognition from peers and principals; - Role ambiguity; - Ensuring equal treatment of all teachers	5 4 4 5
Systemic Friction and Reform Dissonance	- Misalignment between reform intent and legacy norms; - Navigating hierarchical expectations; - Cultural resistance; - Legal constraints and outdated decrees	4 4 5 5
Post-SIP Leadership Trajectories	-Discontinuation of shared leadership practices due to end of LDP/SIP - Reversion to legal mandates limiting principal autonomy	5 5

Table 2.

Thematic analysis of teachers’ interviews.

Themes	Subthemes	Frequency
Reframing Professional Identity	- Shifting from implementers to initiators; - Viewing leadership as shared responsibility; - Expressing confidence in leading peers	16 15 17
Negotiating Power Dynamics	- Experiencing ambiguity in leadership roles; - Navigating hierarchical school cultures; - Perception that principals lose power by sharing authority	20 18 17
Barriers to Agency	- Institutional resistance to change; -Need for multilevel approvals and excessive paperwork; Return to comfort zone due to bureaucratic fatigue	20 20 14
Collaborative Practice as Resistance	- Peer support and solidarity in reform efforts; - Joint problem-solving around SIP tasks; - Informal mentoring and role modeling	12 13 11
Emergent Legitimacy	- Gaining trust through visible contribution; - Validation from students and parents; - Undermining politics from colleagues resistant to change	16 17 11
Post-SIP Leadership Trajectories	-No leadership space for teachers under current legal framework -Commitment to informal leadership with trusted peers, students, and families despite systemic constraints	7 13

Shared themes across principals and teachers

Reframing leadership roles and professional identity

Both school principals and teacher leaders reported a transformation in how they viewed their professional roles during the implementation of the SIP and following their participation in the LDP. This shift did not occur all at once but developed as principals and teachers worked together on SIP tasks, participated in joint discussions, and gradually moved beyond their usual role boundaries. Through these repeated interactions, leadership came to be experienced less as a fixed position and more as a shared, though unevenly negotiated, practice. This transformation was characterized by a shift from traditional, hierarchical definitions of leadership toward more participatory, collaborative, and identity-driven enactments. P1 reflected, “Before the SIP and LDP, I used to feel responsible for everything. Now I try to include teachers more in decisions—but I’m still the one accountable if something fails.” Similarly, P3 noted, “After the LDP, we’re no longer the only decision-makers. Teachers come with plans related to the SIP, and we discuss them seriously.”

Teacher leaders described a parallel shift in their self-perception. T1.2 explained, “Before the SIP, leadership wasn’t our business. But during the SIP implementation, we sat at the table and decided things that affected the whole school.” T3.3 stated, “During the SIP, I began to feel like I was doing more than just teaching. I was leading training and organizing work—it felt like leadership.” T4.1 added, “Even though I don’t hold a title, the SIP experience made me feel that I contribute to the school's direction.”

This evolving identity was tied to increased visibility and recognition. As T5.2 shared, “My voice started to matter during the SIP—not because I’m special, but because the LDP and SIP gave us the space to act.”

Negotiating power, trust, and relational boundaries

Principals and teacher leaders described the process of renegotiating authority and building mutual trust within the evolving relational landscape shaped by the SIP reform and LDP training. Their accounts suggested that leadership negotiation unfolded gradually during SIP implementation rather than being settled from the outset. In several cases, teachers first entered the process by offering suggestions, taking responsibility for specific tasks, or voicing views in meetings, while principals initially responded with caution as they weighed participation against their own formal accountability. As SIP work progressed, these early interactions became moments through which roles were tested, trust was built, and the boundaries of teacher involvement were adjusted. P2 remarked, “Letting go of power is not easy. We were trained in the LDP to lead from beside, but it's a shift—we’re used to leading from the front.” P4 commented, “As part of the SIP work, I had to make sure I treated all teachers equally—I couldn’t support only those who were active in the LDP. That would have created tension.” Trust emerged as a key condition for successful leadership distribution. P5 said, “Once I gave space to the teachers during SIP implementation and they succeeded, I started trusting them more. That's when things changed.” P3 added, “It's still my name on official letters, but the LDP taught me not to make decisions alone.”

Teachers offered parallel reflections. T1.1 noted, “We had to prove to our principal that we could be trusted with leading SIP activities. Only then were we given real responsibilities.” T3.2 explained, “At the start of the SIP, we didn’t know if we were overstepping. But when our opinions were taken seriously, we felt like we were truly part of the process.” Some expressed reservations. T2.3 shared, “Even though we were asked to lead SIP activities, we felt like our principal was afraid of losing control.” T4.3 stated, “There were moments during the SIP when we weren’t sure whether our leadership was truly welcomed or just formally tolerated.”

Systemic barriers to agency and participation

Participants across all five schools described structural and bureaucratic constraints that impeded their agency and slowed the momentum of SIP-driven reforms. These constraints also affected the negotiation process itself, as attempts to expand teacher involvement were often interrupted by approval requirements, administrative delays, and procedural obstacles that pulled decision-making back toward formal authority. In this sense, negotiation was not only relationally delicate but also structurally fragile, repeatedly subject to disruption by the wider system. Despite the autonomy emphasized in the LDP and SIP framework, existing institutional mechanisms continued to pose challenges. P1 stated, “Even during the SIP, when you want to act fast, you still have to go through official approvals. That slows everything down.” P4 added, “The LDP trained us to lead proactively, but laws and decrees still control what we can and can’t do, even in SIP tasks.”

Teachers described these constraints as emotionally draining and demotivating. T5.1 remarked, “There are too many approvals. You have to write letters, wait for responses, and fill out forms. During the SIP, it got to the point where I just wanted to go back to my comfort zone.” T2.4 echoed, “The system is built to stop you from moving forward. It takes energy to keep going.”

School politics also played a role. T3.4 said, “Some teachers who weren’t part of the LDP made alliances to block our SIP ideas. They said we were acting like we’re better than them.” T4.2 observed, “I felt like some colleagues were waiting for us to fail, just so things would go back to how they were before the SIP.” Even in schools where principals supported teacher leadership, structural barriers remained. T1.3 explained, “Our principal believed in us and supported our SIP initiatives, but he couldn’t change the system. That made our work harder.”

Themes distinct to principals

Balancing authority with equity and accountability

Principals highlighted the complex challenge of sharing leadership during the SIP implementation while maintaining formal accountability and ensuring equitable treatment of staff. This balance was considered critical to sustaining trust and preventing perceptions of favoritism, especially within the structure introduced by the LDP.

P2 stated, “Even during the SIP, when some teachers were more active, I had to support everyone equally. If it looked like I was giving privileges, it could divide the team.” P3 echoed, “When one teacher leads and others don’t, it becomes difficult to manage expectations. Throughout the reform period, I had to remain neutral in how I responded to everyone's ideas.”

Several principals emphasized that accountability remained with them, despite the participatory aims of the initiative. As P4 put it, “During the SIP, if something went wrong, no one asked the teacher—they asked me. That's why I still had to review and approve every step.” P5 added, “Yes, leadership had to be shared because of the LDP, but it couldn’t be blind delegation. I had to make sure everything aligned with Ministry expectations.” Reflecting on the tension, P1 explained, “You want to empower teachers as the LDP encouraged, but not at the cost of imbalance. If some staff feel left behind, the whole collaborative culture promoted by the SIP can fall apart.”

Navigating legal mandates and centralized governance

A distinct theme for principals was the ongoing tension between their autonomy in leading SIP initiatives and the rigid national regulations governing public schools. While the LDP provided tools and expectations for school-level reform, principals remained bound by legal mandates and centralized approval mechanisms from the Ministry of Education.

P2 noted, “Even with the LDP training, there were decrees we couldn’t bypass. We might want to innovate locally, but the national system doesn’t move at the same pace.” P1 added, “During the SIP, we still had to send requests for approvals up the chain. Sometimes we’d wait weeks just to move forward.” These structural constraints often limited reform flexibility. P3 shared, “I wanted to extend our SIP work into areas we didn’t cover in the training, but the law wouldn’t allow it. So we had to compromise.” P4 explained, “The LDP introduced great ideas, but the governance model stayed the same. Every action we took still had to be backed by policy or decree.”

P5 described navigating this space as an ongoing negotiation: “We tried to apply the reform vision, but always with one eye on the regulations. That's the only way to lead in the public system—by walking the line between innovation and compliance.”

Themes distinct to teachers

Collaborative practice as a form of resistance

Teachers described their collaboration during the SIP period as more than just a support strategy—it functioned as a subtle form of resistance to top-down control. Enabled by the LDP's emphasis on distributed leadership, these peer-led practices empowered teachers to navigate constraints and enact change from within.

T1.2 stated, “We knew we couldn’t change everything through the SIP, but by working together after the LDP training, we felt stronger. We supported each other to try new things without waiting for permission.” T2.4 reflected, “It was easier to speak up during SIP meetings when we were united. Alone, you hesitate, but as a group, you feel protected.” Moreover, T3.3 explained, “We planned our SIP contributions together after school. We didn’t wait for top-down instructions—we created our own agenda.” Similarly, T4.1 noted, “We learned to rely on each other during the SIP. When something didn’t work, we solved it among ourselves before involving the principal.”

Emerging legitimacy through contribution and recognition

Many teachers recounted how they gradually gained legitimacy as leaders during the SIP period—not through formal designation but through visible action and recognition by peers, principals, parents, and external stakeholders. T1.1 shared, “After I organized two workshops as part of our SIP plan, the principal started involving me more. That's when I felt I was finally taken seriously.” T3.4 said, “I saw the change when parents thanked me for the new activities we created under the SIP. That was the first time I felt like a real leader.” Moreover, T5.2 explained, “When Ministry visitors asked us directly about our SIP projects, I realized our work mattered beyond the school.” T2.3 added, “When others began asking for our help, we knew we had earned that trust.”

Bureaucratic fatigue and the erosion of initiative

Several teachers expressed how bureaucratic procedures during the SIP period—despite the reform's empowering language—led to exhaustion, reduced motivation, and ultimately the erosion of initiative. T1.4 complained, “We had to fill out three different forms just to get materials approved for our SIP activities. It made me wonder why we were trying so hard.” T4.3 remarked, “Every new idea we proposed during the SIP came with more paperwork. It kills your energy, and you just want to go back to your comfort zone.” Moreover, T5.3 added, “Sometimes we gave up. You’d propose something for the SIP, and it would get stuck between three people who had to approve it.” T2.2 echoed, “The system, even under the LDP, tells you ‘be proactive,’ but the process makes you feel like quitting.”

Micropolitics and undermining dynamics among peers

Teachers described how internal resistance from colleagues—particularly those not engaged in the LDP or SIP—manifested in subtle political maneuvers aimed at undermining leadership efforts. These dynamics revealed the contested terrain of teacher leadership in reform contexts.

T3.1 observed, “Not everyone was happy with how we stepped up during the SIP. Some colleagues started gossiping that we were trying to replace the principal.” T5.4 shared, “They formed their own circle and ignored everything we proposed for the SIP. It felt personal and coordinated.” Furthermore, T2.1 said, “There was jealousy, especially from those not trained in the LDP. Some thought we were trying to show off by taking the lead.” T4.2 added, “It felt political. People who didn’t want change started working together to quietly stop the SIP from working.” Finally, T1.3 concluded, “The hardest part of the SIP wasn’t the planning—it was managing the reactions of people who didn’t want us to lead at all.”

Post-SIP leadership trajectories

As the SIP period drew to a close, school principals and teacher leaders shared their expectations regarding the sustainability of shared leadership practices introduced during the LDP. Their reflections revealed concerns about the reassertion of centralized control, apprehensions about the limits imposed by current laws and decrees, and diverging anticipations about their future roles in school leadership.

Principals’ perspectives

Principals voiced uncertainty about the feasibility of maintaining participatory leadership structures in the absence of the LDP framework. While many valued the collaborative gains made during the SIP, they anticipated a return to hierarchical practices driven by regulatory obligations.

P3 anticipated, “Now that the project is ending, I expect to go back to traditional protocols. Without the LDP pushing us, we can’t keep these structures going on our own.” P2 remarked, “I fear that everything will shift back. Legally, I am personally not authorized to lead.” Moreover, principals reflected on their limited room for maneuver once the external mandate ceased. P1 noted, “Unless the Ministry updates the regulations, I won’t be able to formally include teachers like before. I will have to adhere to what's written in the decrees.” P4 added, “We were encouraged to share leadership, but our governance system doesn't allow it as a sustained practice. It was a project, a pilot, a nice journey that have come to an end.”

Teachers’ perspectives

Teacher leaders, too, expressed mixed expectations about the post-SIP landscape. Some anticipated that their leadership roles would dissipate once the project concluded due to the rigid legal framework governing public schools. T1.4 said, “I don’t expect my leadership role to continue. Without the SIP, we return to how things used to be—no leadership space for teachers.” T2.1 reflected, “It was the program that gave us room to lead. Without it, we’re back to delivering lessons and nothing more.”

Others, however, expressed a strong commitment to sustaining aspects of their leadership practices informally, particularly through collaboration with trusted colleagues, students, and families. T3.1 anticipated, “Even if we’re not officially leading, I’ll keep working with the team we built. The trust is still there.” T5.2 shared, “We’ve changed during this project. I want to keep supporting students and their families differently—even if no one calls it leadership.” In the same vein, T2.4 articulated this resolve: “We’re not naïve. We know the system won’t change overnight. But we’ve seen what it means to lead, and we’ll keep doing it in small ways.” T3.3 added, “We’re ready for the next phase—even if it's harder. Once you’ve stepped into leadership, you don’t just walk back.”

Discussion

This study examined how teacher leadership was enacted in a highly centralized school system through a national school-based reform initiative. Drawing on principals’ and teacher leaders’ accounts, the findings show that teacher leadership did not emerge as a straightforward implementation of policy but as a negotiated, tension-filled, and fragile transformation occurring in interstitial spaces where roles, authority, and agency were continually contested.

At the core lies a paradox: although the LDP and SIP were designed to democratize leadership, the enactment of teacher leadership remained tightly mediated by entrenched hierarchies and cultural norms of authority. Principals did begin to move beyond administrative compliance—building trust, involving teachers in decisions, and mediating between reform expectations and institutional inertia—but these shifts were partial and precarious, limited by legal mandates that continued to define leadership in narrow, top-down terms. This resonates with Woods (2016) critique that distributed leadership in centralized systems often produces an illusion of agency, as well as Tourish's (2014) argument that educators may adopt the language and routines of distributed leadership without unsettling underlying hierarchies. Echoing Gunter (2001), drawing on Bourdieu (2000), the findings suggest a form of “misrecognition,” in which symbolic inclusion is mistaken for substantive empowerment: collaboration is orchestrated, but existing power relations remain largely intact.

For teacher leaders, this created an unstable space of action. Their narratives of moving from implementers to initiators highlight the performative dimensions of leadership identity (DeRue and Ashford, 2010), yet these emerging identities were continually undermined by bureaucratic fatigue, peer resistance, and institutional inertia—classic “agency tensions” (Schaap et al., 2019). Many anticipated that once the SIP ended, their leadership roles would contract, revealing a model of teacher leadership that was temporarily expansive but structurally precarious. At the same time, a subset of teachers voiced a determination to sustain their leadership practices informally, despite the reassertion of rigid hierarchies. Acknowledging legal, procedural, and cultural limits, they articulated alternative pathways grounded in informal influence, moral authority, and solidarity with colleagues and students. Their stance aligns with Vossoughi et al. (2023) notion of “rightful presence,” whereby individuals claim leadership through relational trust, pedagogical commitment, and ethical action even in the absence of formal recognition. In this sense, some teachers turned leadership into a quiet, relationally grounded act of defiance against compliance-driven logics and hierarchical schooling.

The findings also indicate that the reform produced liminal spaces—temporary zones in which conventional boundaries of leadership were loosened and where principals and teachers could experiment with new configurations of influence. These spaces mirror Hanson's (2003) “contested zones,” in which authority is fluid, negotiated, and always vulnerable to reassertion by dominant actors. Teachers’ collaborative practices functioned both as professional support and as subtle resistance to bureaucratic constraint, echoing Fairman and Mackenzie's (2015) insight that teacher leadership often thrives less in formal positions than in socially legitimized actions anchored in shared moral purpose. Yet these same enactments exposed teacher leaders to micropolitical contestation—jealousy, exclusion, and attempts at delegitimization—underscoring that efforts to empower one group can provoke backlash from others who feel displaced.

Despite the promising shifts observed during the SIP period, both principals and teachers emphasized systemic barriers to sustaining distributed leadership. Legal decrees, centralized approval mechanisms, and deeply embedded norms of compliance constrained principals’ autonomy and relegated teacher leadership to episodic, largely informal practices. This pattern corroborates prior critiques of Lebanese public sector reform as technocratically designed but bureaucratically implemented (El-Amine, 2018; Ghamrawi et al., 2017, 2025). Theoretically, the study contributes to distributed leadership scholarship by showing that in highly centralized systems, leadership distribution cannot be understood simply as the diffusion of tasks or the sharing of practice across actors, as often emphasized in classic formulations (Harris, 2013; Spillane, 2006; Spillane and Diamond, 2007). Rather, the findings suggest that distribution is mediated through ongoing negotiation over legitimacy, authority, and professional space, all of which remain tightly shaped by bureaucratic rules and cultural expectations. In this sense, the study extends distributed leadership theory by showing that where formal authority structures remain unchanged, distributed leadership may appear in episodic and provisional forms rather than as a durable organizational condition. It also adds to teacher leadership scholarship by demonstrating that teacher leadership in such settings emerges less as an institutionalized role and more as a negotiated and fragile enactment of agency, dependent on principal mediation and vulnerable to reversal once reform scaffolding recedes. Seen in this light, the findings illustrate a reform disjunction in which globally circulating ideas of distributed leadership and teacher agency are introduced into local governance architectures that remain structurally unchanged. The LDP's participatory vision was therefore conceptually progressive yet institutionally unanchored, with leadership enacted in the cracks of the system rather than at its core.

Viewed through the four analytic pairings that framed this study, the findings show, first, how authority and agency remained in constant tension as principals and teachers experimented with new forms of influence while still bound by centralized decrees; second, how command and collaboration coexisted uneasily, with SIP structures inviting joint decision-making even as principals retained formal accountability and teachers remained exposed to bureaucratic sanction; third, how coleadership and co-option were intertwined, as teachers were drawn into reform work that expanded their responsibilities and visibility without securing durable shifts in formal power; and finally, how parallel leadership trajectories and power struggles unfolded simultaneously, with principals and teacher leaders developing new identities and practices while facing micropolitical resistance, jealousy, and efforts to restore traditional hierarchies.

Contributions, limitations, and future research

This study advances scholarship on teacher leadership in non-Western, highly centralized systems by challenging universalist assumptions that leadership models can be transferred across contexts without adaptation and by foregrounding the contextual interplay of agency, authority, and power. Through attention to the micropolitics of enactment, it offers a nuanced account of how donor-driven reform interacts with institutional logics and professional identities. A key strength lies in its embedded multiple case design and dual vantage point, capturing both principal and teacher perspectives and enabling a relational analysis of how leadership roles were coconstructed, contested, and, at times, withdrawn.

At the same time, the study's scope is bounded. The sample is limited to five schools within a single reform program, which may restrict the transferability of findings beyond similar initiatives, and data were collected at the end of the SIP, providing anticipatory rather than longitudinal insights. In addition, because the study relied on interview-based accounts rather than observational evidence, the analysis captures participants’ reported experiences and interpretations of negotiation and power relations rather than direct observation of these practices as they unfolded. Future research could therefore track how informal teacher leadership practices evolve, persist, or dissipate once external support ends, particularly where formal roles remain constrained. Policy-oriented work is also needed to examine the legal and bureaucratic conditions under which teacher leadership can be formally recognized and sustained in centralized systems, while comparative studies across other Global South contexts could deepen understanding of how teacher leadership is conceptualized and enacted under different structural and political arrangements.

Conclusion

This study exposes the tensions, possibilities, and contradictions involved in reconfiguring leadership within a centralized public school system. The LDP and SIP provided only temporary scaffolding for distributed leadership: they opened space for new forms of agency among principals and teachers, yet these shifts remained precarious within a policy landscape dominated by hierarchical authority and legal mandates. The findings show that meaningful change in school leadership cannot be achieved through technical fixes or short-term projects alone; it requires structural recalibration, cultural renegotiation, and sustained political will. The emergence of informal teacher leadership, especially among those who continued to lead after external mandates expired, signals a quiet resistance that reframes leadership as an ethical practice rather than positional privilege. At the same time, the donor-driven, small-scale nature of the reform raises concerns about scalability, ownership, and sustainability. In illuminating how agency is simultaneously enabled and constrained by system structures and donor expectations, and in tracing the interplay of authority and agency, command and collaboration, coleadership and co-option, and parallel leadership trajectories versus power struggles, the study argues that leadership in such systems is never simply devolved but continually negotiated within contested organizational and political spaces.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Norma Ghamrawi

Informed consent

All participants in this study were informed of the purpose of the study and how data will be used. They were assured that their identities would remain anonymous across the study.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

Data associated with this study are not made available for confidentiality reasons.

Author biographies

Norma Ghamrawi is a professor of educational leadership & management at the College of Education in Qatar University.

Tarek Shal is a Research Assistant Professor at the Social & Economic Survey Institute at Qatar University.

Najah Ghamrawi is a professor of educational psychology at the Faculty of Education of the Lebanese University.

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