Pursuing the elusive construct of distributed leadership

Abstract

Distributed leadership is one of the most prominent contemporary leadership theories in education. Its attraction in education is perhaps due to its potential to bring about school improvement. A review of the literature, however, reveals broadness in the way the construct is being conceptualized and operationalized; thus making it elusive. The elusive nature of distributed leadership could be down to the lack of attempts to unpack and measure this construct, and/or because of the contested definition of the term ‘leadership’ itself. The purpose of this article is to elucidate this construct by addressing possible dimensionality issues. To do this, exploratory factor analysis was performed using Rasch (linearized) standardized residuals to examine the factor structure of distributed leadership. The analysis provided a lucid interpretation of the data to build a theoretical (measurement) model of distributed leadership. The distributed leadership instrument consists of 25 items, and the sample involved 1,232 schools leaders from Singapore. The findings indicated the presence of four possible factors of distributed leadership which include bounded empowerment, developing leadership, shared decision and collective engagement.

The role of VET Colleges in stimulating teachers’ engagement in team learning

“…This means that those individuals who are best equipped, skilled or positioned to lead in a certain situation do so, regardless of whether they are in formal leadership positions (Harris & DeFlaminis, 2016). Distributed leadership is flexible and versatile (Hairon & Goh, 2015;Harris, 2008), and the person who is best equipped, skilled or positioned can differ from situation to situation, and therefore who leads may also differ according to the situation. For instance, when improving the quality of CBE programmes, some teachers may be more skilled in developing new grading methods and therefore lead during this aspect of the improvement, while others may be more skilled in integrating courses and lead during that aspect.…”

“…Gronn, 2002;Spillane, 2005), many scholars agree that different conceptualisations of distributed leadership have made the concept elusive (e.g. Hairon & Goh, 2015;Harris & Spillane, 2008;Tian et al, 2016), resulting in conceptual confusion and overlap with other concepts such as shared leadership, democratic leadership and collaborative leadership. For empirical studies on distributed leadership it is therefore important to determine characteristics of distributed leadership that scholars agree upon and to conceptualize these characteristics in measurable ways.…”

“…Empirical evidence on antecedents and outcomes of distributed leadership is limited (Hairon & Goh, 2015;Tian et al, 2016), which implies that its relationship with team learning is largely unknown. Only a few studies have examined relationships between shared leadership -a concept closely related to distributed leadership -and team learning, and these suggest that shared leadership supports team learning (Koeslag-Kreunen et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2014).…”

“…Recently Hairon and Goh (2015) did this by developing a questionnaire measuring formal leaders' role in distributed leadership. They neglected however how teachers distribute leadership within their teams.…”

“…First, although the influence of formal leaders' actions on distributed leadership is often emphasized, scholars such as Crawford (2012) and Tian et al (2016) argue that only a few studies have actually examined formal leaders' actions. Formal leaders can create opportunities for distributed leadership (Tian et al, 2016), but can also put boundaries on distributed leadership (Hairon & Goh, 2015). As such, they act as what Bush and Glover (2012) called 'gatekeepers' of distributed leadership.…”