A global perspective on school leadership: Evidence from a latent class analysis on OECD TALIS data

Abstract

Previous research highlighted the existence of multiple educational leadership styles; however, evidence on their multidimensional application is limited. The current study defines an innovative cross-national classification for school leaders along the two dimensions of instructional and distributed leadership. We apply a three-step Latent Class Analysis to transnationally generalizable Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Teaching and Learning International Survey 2013 data, with N = 9384 school principals surveyed across 32 countries. From here, we identify four sub-groups of leaders: integrating leaders (64.9% of the sample), who adopt instructional and distributed leadership in an integrated way, participative leaders (22.2%) and supportive leaders (8.5%), who are respectively high only on distributed or instructional leadership, and contingent leaders (4.4%), without a specific a priori leadership approach. Features specific to the principals, the schools and the school context are significantly related to leadership sub-group membership and important moderators of the correlation between types of leadership and students’ test scores, as analyzed for a subset of countries. As implications for leadership policy and practice, the cross-country prevalence of integrating leaders might increase the level of organizational complexity, while the geographical distribution of leadership classes highlights the important role played by cultural aspects in influencing leadership practices.