Dispersed Leadership Research Articles

The Importance of Distributed Leadership Practice Perceived By the Head of the Department: A Study of a Public University in Afghanistan

This qualitative scale research means to comprehend the act of distributive leadership among senior colleges as like chancellor deans and administrators. The scientist used a non-trial subjective, grounded hypothesis to look into the plan. Theoretical framework distributing leadership in a school network gives a chance for educators to impact important community-oriented or collaborative practices through shared authority. Spillane (2005) clarified that dispersed leadership is a point of view of a calculated or analytic instrument for pondering school authority. It’s anything but a definite diagram for viable authority, nor an expose of how the leader ought to be practiced and shared duties have been a guide in creating research questions. A solitary respondent included, which was the head of the department. The information was gathered utilizing meeting strategies dependent on semi-organized inquiries. Meeting information was dissected through a precise coding procedure to discover themes. In view of the examination of these topics, the most noteworthy subjects that developed reliably are hierarchical culture measurement, trailed by vision, strategic, authoritative objectives measurement, trailed by a common duty measurement, and the least is the element of initiative practices. The university vision, crucial, objectives were shared among individuals in the arranging and performance of exercises. Be that as it may, as a type of authority dependent on shared exercises, there are still spaces for improvements, for example, common trust, closeness, and sharing of obligations.

Management versus Governance Power Contests Facing Principals in Schools: Power Relations

The focus of the article is about issues that secondary schools face in terms of the responsibilities of principals and school governing bodies (SGBs) in terms of dispersed leadership rather than one-man role-based leadership. Methods: The study investigates issues of schools surrounding distributed leadership practices using data from research on the connection between the principal and school governing bodies. This research used qualitative and quantitative data collected from secondary school administrators, SGB members, and teachers as part of a design research project. Implications: According to the findings, concentrating on distributed leadership methods may assist overcome some of the drawbacks of providing feedback to a single leader. Findings: In Gauteng secondary schools, opposing ideas and expectations predominate. Where SGBs and principals struggle against one another, ambiguous rules are found. Some principals impose terms on SGBs, while SGBs impose terms on principals. Dysfunctional schools are caused by weak governance and management. In terms of financial problems, there is a lack of transparency in schools. Principals contribute to school problems by refusing or failing to accept their ineptness. They continue to run schools inefficiently; they do not fully engage teachers in school management; they mistreat parents; they impose terms on SGBs; they contribute to dysfunctional schools; school resources are embezzled for purposes not related to the running of schools, and they mix up their work with that of the SGBs. Principals and SGBs should be made aware that cooperation, rather than competition, may be more effective in reducing power struggles in schools.

Coalition Dynamics in Transnational Social Movements: Analyzing the EU Food Policy Coalition

ABSTRACT In the context of policy discussions surrounding the EU common agricultural policy in the period after 2020, civil society groups across Europe launched advocacy campaigns to transform the CAP and EU food systems. This article focuses on the EU Food Policy Coalition, a diverse coalition with a wide-ranging agenda. How did disparate civil society groups with different areas of focus that include the environment, public health, and global justice form a viable and cohesive advocacy coalition and develop a joint vision for a transformed food system? And how can this mostly Brussels-based coalition centred on a professional community engage grassroots and conscience communities in advocating for a more sustainable food system? We find that a diverse coalition can mobilise around a shared vision when a coalition broker brings diverse groups together, building on preexisting ties and trust and on the convergence of their ideologies. We also find that a diverse coalition engages different social movement communities, remains unified, and is effective when it is well-coordinated and organised as a segmentary, polycentric, and integrated network. This organisational structure allows for flexibility in participation and for dispersed leadership within the coalition, while keeping a unified focus around a set of key norms.

Perspectives on leadership development in post-Soviet Eurasia

Young people throughout Eurasia are looking for leadership that is different from what preceding generations experienced in the Soviet era and many people are still accustomed to, namely a less top-down authoritarian style by a solo leader reflecting the outdated ‘Great Man’ model of ‘strong’ leadership and for a more collaborative, participative style with more dispersed leadership. This implies the need for a significant cultural change. Leadership development programmes now need to refocus their philosophy, objectives and methods on ways of developing a culture of participation, trust, a sense of belonging, teamwork and accountability and the required know-how and skills in today’s and future leaders. We present two research projects and a case study that reveal these needs and how a new approach to ethical and effective leadership development that appropriately integrates Western and Eastern values can help to liberate and develop the culture and economies of the Eurasia region and thereby make Eurasia a new global powerhouse.

New Zealand Public Service Response to Covid-19

The New Zealand public service faced an unprecedented challenge in 2020. The focus of this article is on what the Covid-19 experience can tell us about the strengths of the public service, and whether the course that we have set for the future, enshrined through the Public Service Act 2020, is the right one. The established directions of public service change helped the Covid response: functional leadership made a definite contribution; dispersed leadership roles proved their worth; the deepening experience of inter-agency collaboration over the past decade cannot be proved to have contributed, but it seems reasonable to conclude that it did. Public servants proved willing to behave as participants in a single service rather than employees of a single agency, living up to the more complete view of human motivation reflected in the Public Service Act. The article concludes with some observations on the importance of interoperability for the future public service, and on the implications the strong Mäori response to Covid-19 may have for the public service of the future.

The role of leadership in implementing and sustaining an evidence-based intervention for osteoarthritis (ESCAPE-pain) in NHS physiotherapy services: a qualitative case study

Purpose To explore the role of leadership by physiotherapists in implementing and sustaining an evidence-based complex intervention (ESCAPE-pain) for osteoarthritis. Materials and methods A qualitative case study approach using in-depth interviews with 23 clinicians and managers from 4 National Health Service (NHS) physiotherapy providers in England between 2016 and 2017. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Results Different leadership roles and actions were characterised with four themes: (1) Clinical champions – clinicians driving the sustainability of ESCAPE-pain; (2) Supporters – junior clinicians directly supporting clinical champions’ efforts to sustain ESCAPE-pain; (3) Senior Manager – clinical champions’ senior managers influence on sustainability; (4) Decision-making – (in)formal processes underpinning decisions to (not) sustain the programme. Conclusions The study characterises the role of leadership in physiotherapy to sustain an evidence-based intervention for osteoarthritis (OA) within the NHS. Sustaining the intervention required on-going leadership, it did not stop at implementation. Senior specialist physiotherapists (as Champions) had a critical leadership role in driving sustainability. Their structural position (bridging the operational and strategic) and personal attributes allowed them to integrate different levels of leadership (i.e., senior managers and operational staff) to mobilise the collective, on-going work required for sustaining the programme. IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION Senior managers and clinicians in practice settings need to be aware that sustaining an intervention is an on-going, collective effort that continues post-implementation. Senior managers need to enable senior clinicians (who straddle strategic and operational functions) to have sufficient autonomy to access and mobilise resources and scope to restructure local systems and practice to support intervention sustainability. Operational staff need to be supported to have the practical know-how to deliver evidence-based intervention, which includes instilling the value of and a commitment for the interventions. Managers need to utilise dispersed leadership to empower and enthuse frontline clinicians to participate fully in the work to refine and sustain interventions, because it cannot be achieved by lone individuals.

Teymisvinna og forysta: Birtingarmynd fimm árum eftir að innleiðingarferli faglegs lærdómssamfélags lauk

Frá ágúst 2009 til desember 2012 átti sér stað vinna við innleiðingu og þróun faglegs lærdómssamfélags í nýjum grunnskóla í þéttbýli. Samhliða var gerð starfendarannsókn í skólanum, í samstarfi ytri aðila og skólastjórnenda. Þar var rannsakað hvaða þýðingu forysta stjórnenda hafði fyrir þróun starfshátta í nýjum skóla og hvað studdi hana. Stuðst var við ígrundun stjórnenda, vettvangsathuganir, viðtöl og mat ásamt rýni í fyrirliggjandi gögn í skólanum. Í lok rannsóknartímabilsins sýndu niðurstöður að teymisvinna var einkennandi fyrir skólastarfið og kennarar í teymum tóku forystu á ýmsan hátt með stjórnendum. Mörg teymi mátti skilgreina sem lærdómsteymi. Starfið var ekki átakalaust en stjórnendur sinntu forystuhlutverki sínu með seiglu, eftirfylgni og lausnaleit að vopni. Fimm árum síðar, skólaárið 2017–2018, var gerð eftirfylgnirannsókn í skólanum þar sem tekin voru rýnihópaviðtöl við teymi og lagt fyrir matstæki um lærdómssamfélag. Leitað var svara við rannsóknarspurningunum: Hvað einkennir teymisvinnu og forystu stjórnenda og kennara/teyma í skólanum fimm árum eftir að innleiðingarferli lærdómssamfélags lauk árið 2012? Hverjar eru helstu áskoranirnar? Frá því að fyrri rannsókn lauk hefur nemendum skólans fjölgað og miklar breytingar hafa orðið í starfsmannahópnum, ekki síst stjórnendateyminu. Enn er teymisvinna við lýði í skólanum og innri umgjörð skólans styður við samkennslu árganga, samstarf og leiðsögn. Skilgreining og stigskipting teyma sem stuðst var við í upphafi er þó ekki öllum kunn, vinnubrögð í teymum eru ekki samræmd og kennarar í teymum sinna forystu lítið. Sterkar vísbendingar eru um að teymi séu einangruð og að skólastjórnendur fylgist minna með kennslu og námi í kennslustundum en áður. Hér verður greint frá helstu niðurstöðum eftirfylgnirannsóknarinnar og þær skoðaðar í samhengi við fyrri niðurstöður.

What Prompts Policy Change? Comparative Analyses of Efforts to Create Age-Friendly Cities in 14 Cities in Indonesia

ABSTRACTFour years after an age-friendly city (AFC) assessment across Indonesia, this article presents a comparative analysis of policy changes that have taken place across different AFC dimensions and factors associated with more and less change. Nine of fourteen cities initiated changes, ranging from public declarations, regulations, and creation or expansion of services. Our findings suggest that the AFC assessment can offer a means to engage policy makers, which in turn may facilitate city-level change, particularly for larger cities with more substantive budgets and more consolidated rather than dispersed leadership; however, no single factor represented a sufficient or necessary condition for change.

Rethinking distributed leadership: dimensions, antecedents and team effectiveness

PurposeStudies of distributed leadership (DL) are increasing, but are not systematic, often taking a normative position emphasizing the superiority of DL to solo leadership and using the term in an imprecise way. The purpose of this paper is to re-conceptualize DL and develop a systematic framework to identify dimensions of DL and their association with team effectiveness.Design/methodology/approachBased on a comprehensive review of existing literature, this paper develops a systematic framework of DL and team effectiveness by deriving eight research propositions.FindingsBased on two perspectives, role space occupation and dependency of actions, the paper identifies four main dimensions of DL: shared, conjoint, fragmented and dispersed leadership, each of which represents a specific pattern of DL activities. A leader-task-context (LTC) framework is developed to analyze outcomes of DL dimensions in different settings. The eight propositions developed clearly identify where DL can be best applied, how particular configurations of DL affect team performance, and in what situations it is most effective.Originality/valueThis paper has made several contributions. First, the authors address the question of what constitutes DL by conceptualizing its dimensions. Second, the authors extend the DL literature by arguing and modeling how different contexts influence the fulfillment of DL. Third, the authors develop an analytical framework of DL – the “LTC” framework – to help build a foundation and guide further research on the relationships between DL and team performance.

Introduction: leadership questions in transnational european governance

Even more so than the United States, the European Union (EU) marks a classic case of an ‘anti-leadership environment’ designed to hinder rather than facilitate political leadership. While there have been, nevertheless, manifestations of leadership since the very beginning of European integration, the enigmatic features of leadership at the European level, and the specific difficulties in getting hold of the subject, have limited more systematic political research in this field. This article seeks to relate some of the perennial questions of political leadership research to the study of transnational European governance. Such an inquiry suggests that, in light of the recent changes in the conceptualization of leadership to be found in the wider literature, the empirical features of collective and dispersed leadership in the EU have gradually lost their peculiarity. This notwithstanding, the EU continues to have both a leadership and a followership problem, and the challenges ahead are unlikely to be overcome by institutional adaptation and reform alone.

Dispersed Leadership in Teams: Conceptualization and Measurement of a Three-Dimensional Model

According to the theory of dispersed leadership in teams, leadership is collectivistic and simultaneously exerted by the leader (interactional), by team members (team), and by the organizational ma...

Toward a theory of dispersed leadership in teams: Model, findings, and directions for future research

This paper addresses a new perspective how leadership can be conceptualized in times of dispersed and team working structures. The dispersed leadership theory in teams proposes three distinguishing types of leadership, which include interactional leadership exerted by leaders; team leadership provided by team members; and structural leadership influenced by work and organizational factors (i.e., task, organizational structures, and customers). It is assumed that these three types of leadership simultaneously exert influence on follower’s attitudes and behaviors in teams. We outline the theory, review empirical evidence based on the model and discuss the strengths and limitations. In conclusion, we discuss relevant emerging topics for future studies.

Local stakeholder participation in transboundary water management: lessons from the Mexicali Valley, Mexico

We examine participation of stakeholders in transboundary water conflicts in the lower Colorado River basin. The analysis focuses on the impacts of institutional arrangements as they relate to two critical water issues in the Mexicali Valley: the salinity problem and the All-American Canal lining conflict. The results show that farmers lost economic, political and organisational power during the period in between these two conflicts, which in turn reduced their role and influence in transboundary water management. During the salinity problem in the 1960s, unified and strong leadership and widespread participation were credited with influencing beneficial outcomes. However, the existence of many opposing points of view regarding the recent All-American Canal lining conflict together with weak and dispersed leadership seem responsible for ineffective stakeholder participation in this later international resource conflict.

Leadership by design

PurposeThis paper aims to explore how the characteristics of outstanding leaders promote dispersed leadership through the beliefs and experience of leaders in some of the UK's best known organizations.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on in‐depth qualitative interviews with 70+ leaders, interviews with direct reports and interviews with more senior leaders carried out between 2008 and 2010, the paper contrasts the approaches to leadership that distinguish high performing leaders from their peers and how these approaches create the climate for devolved leadership.FindingsThe paper highlights the key differences that distinguish outstanding leaders and explores how these differences create climates of empowerment that enable dispersed and devolved leadership to flourish. The paper argues that devolved leadership is not a haphazard process but involves leaders in deliberately creating the right conditions.Practical implicationsThe paper presents the core characteristics of outstanding leaders and how they can not only produce better performing organizations, but also create more robust organizations with more capable, autonomous and innovative employees to help identify and develop leadership populations.Originality/valueThere is a clash between a focus on the leader and a concern for dispersed leadership in organizations. They seem to be opposing views of leadership – one focused on the individual, the other the collective. This paper assimilates these two perspectives and shows how a certain style of leader embeds leadership.

Foregrounding issues of equity and diversity in educational leadership

This article documents the leadership practices within one secondary school in Queensland, Australia that uses equity as a central philosophy. Drawing on specific elements of productive leadership as defined by Hayes et al., the article draws attention to how the school's common equity agenda, its supportive social relations, and its dispersed leadership practices mobilise a transformative discourse of equity. Through these lenses, the article provides important insights for educational leadership amid renewed policy emphasis on the equity responsibilities of schools.

Dispersed Leadership: Exploring the Impact of Antecedent Forms of Power Using a Communicative Framework

This article presents an account of a police organization’s attempt to implement what senior officers described as a dispersed leadership initiative. A communicative framework is used to show how a particular historically constituted discourse is embedded in the communicative actions of those officers who participated in the study. Analysis of the effects of this discourse reveals how the organization’s dispersion of leadership, although on the surface representing a new and successful endeavor, is rendered problematic by what the article terms antecedent forms of power.

Leadership transmission: a muddled metaphor?

The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the concept of "leadership transmission", considering what theoretical and practical value this metaphor brings to the healthcare modernization agenda. The paper develops understanding of the transmission metaphor, whilst theoretical perspectives on leadership are reviewed, including debates, which shed light on the concept by focusing on the phenomenon of distributed or dispersed leadership. The transmission metaphor is perhaps misleading, by implying that "leadership can be caught" like a disease. However, defining leadership in terms of influence, a novel typology of transmission processes is introduced; top down (one-way), inter-organizational (bi-lateral), and dispersed (multi-directional). Recent research suggests that organizational changes are often led by the spontaneous concertive action of staff at all levels, not just by senior élite groups. The way in which dispersed influence processes arise, unfold, and are transmitted into organizational outcomes can be understood through theoretical narratives, which capture event sequences and combinations of factors unfolding over time in a given context. Given the scale and pace of the change agenda, healthcare modernization may indeed depend on widely dispersed leadership. It is therefore necessary to establish the conditions in which leadership transmission is encouraged, to recognize, support, and develop the "unsung heroes" who assume change leadership positions, and to widen the agenda and coverage of NHS leadership development programmes. There is currently no other commentary, empirical or theoretical, academic or professional, which examines critically the concept of leadership transmission, while exploring the nature of this perspective, and its theoretical and practical value.

A critique of transformational leadership: Moral, professional and contingent dimensions of leadership within public services organizations

Our study of secondary schools in England illustrates the ineffective implementation of transformational leadership within public service organizations by policy-makers. First, a rather narrow, managerialist variant of transformational leadership is promoted, which is resisted by school teachers and principals. Second, associated with this, policy does not take account of the institutional context within which public services organizations operate. Third, policy-makers, rather than leaders transform the context within which leadership takes place and any leadership discretion is constrained by central government audit. Instead, moral, professional and contingent approaches to leadership are enacted at the local level with individualized, rather than dispersed leadership, as a consequence of regulatory and normative pressures.

Room for a Thousand Flowers to Bloom

Market value for nascent goods can be unknown for a number of reasons. It can be discovered only through market experience. Does concentrated commercial leadership or dispersed commercial leadership more efficaciously explore value? Concentrated or dispersed commercial leadership describes whether a small or large range of firms, respectively, can commercialize potential services and products for a similar, though uncertain, technological opportunity. Dispersed commercial leadership explores the unknown more quickly than concentrated leadership. Most new firms exploring a technological opportunity do not survive a market test. A wider variety of firms increases the chances that at least one will survive. Beyond selection, more dispersed commercial leadership has another, more subtle effect. It increases the likelihood that a so-called contrarian reaches the marketplace sooner. This effect can be readily visible if the contrarian quickly spurs innovative responses from established firms who otherwise would not have taken any action

Dispersed leadership predictor of the work environment for creativity and productivity

PurposeThis paper examines the relationship between the dimensions of dispersed – self‐management – leadership and a number of work environment dimensions conducive to creativity and productivity.Design/methodology/approachThe study involves a questionnaire‐based survey of employees from a high technology organisation operating in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A total of 104 useable questionnaires were received from employees who are engaged in self‐managing activities. These were subjected to a series of correlational and regression analyses.FindingsThere are three major findings in this research. First, the relationship between dispersed leadership and the “stimulant” dimensions of the work environment for creativity is positive and significant. Second, the relationship between dispersed leadership, with the exception of encouraging self‐reinforcement, and the “obstacle” dimensions of the work environment for creativity is negative and significant. Finally, the findings have clearly shown that the “stimulant” dimensions of the work environment for creativity have a positive and significant impact on both creativity and productivity.Practical implicationsThe study shows that the role of the leader is to be the provider of a context and situation for creativity and productivity. Thus, the art of leading creative organisations in the UAE is the art of handling people and the task of leadership in such organisations is to provide the people with the work – environmental – conditions under which they can exercise their creativity.Originality/valueThe paper clarifies which of the dispersed leadership behaviours best predict the dimensions of the work environment conducive to creativity and productivity. The paper will assist organisations in the UAE in identifying those particular leader behaviours that appear to have an impact on creativity and productivity.