Distributed Leadership

Abstract

Distributed leadership has become the normatively preferred leadership model in the 21st century. Gronn (2010: 70) notes that ‘there has been an accelerating amount of scholarly and practitioner attention’ accorded to this model. An important starting point for understanding the phenomenon is to uncouple it from positional authority. Leadership may arise anywhere in the organization and is not confined to formal leaders. The motivation for distribution arises partly from the growing recognition that principals and other senior leaders are overloaded, particularly in education systems with high levels of decentralization to the school level. Hartley (2010: 27) argues that ‘its popularity may be pragmatic: to ease the burden of overworked headteachers’. However, its attraction goes beyond this instrumental motive to recognition of the merits of pooling all the expertise available to the organisation. This issue of the Journal brings together four articles in a special section on distributed leadership. In the first article, Alma Harris, one of the leading writers on this theme, provides an overview of the evidence base on distributed leadership. She comments that it implies a fundamental re-conceptualization for those in formal leadership roles, especially the headteacher. She notes that interactions between people are more important than the precise nature of leadership roles. She shows that there is evidence of beneficial effects on schools of wider leadership distribution. She reviews several studies which suggest a link between distributed leadership and enhanced student outcomes. She argues that ‘the hope of transforming schools through the actions of individual leaders is quickly fading’ and concludes that those in formal leadership positions should ‘create the conditions where leadership capacity is built, supported and sustained in a purposeful way’. While Alma Harris broadly endorses distributed leadership, Helen Gunter is more sceptical, arguing that it is a way of encouraging teachers to do more work, a form of disguised managerialism (Fitzgerald and Gunter, 2006). In the second article in this issue, Helen, David Hall and Joanna Bragg present a mapping framework to analyse knowledge production and distributed leadership in schools. Drawing on what they describe as ‘our map of the literatures’, they locate texts within a four-part conceptual framework; functional-descriptive, functional-normative, critical, and socially critical. They imply that the ‘considerable investment’ in the principal as transformational leader has failed, because the job of principal is too big for one person. This led to the alternative of distributed leadership, supported by notions of deep leadership and leadership density. They conclude that the ‘historiography of the field remains immature’ and that more needs to be done to critique the realities of everyday practice in democratic schools. The third article, by Jacky Lumby, links distributed leadership to notions of power. She claims that the former’s persistence suggests that it serves some important functions. She criticizes the ‘evangelical’ flavour of much writing on distributed leadership, for example in National College publications. She examines the ways in which power may be distributed and notes the central role of the head teacher in this Educational Management Administration & Leadership 41(5) 543–544 a The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1741143213489497 emal.sagepub.com