Distributed Leadership Model Research Articles

Speaking of Supervision: A dialogic approach to building higher degree research supervision capacity in the creative arts

In the emergent field of creative practice higher degrees by research, first generation supervisors have developed new models of supervision for an unprecedented form of research, which combines creative practice and a written thesis. In a national research project, entitled ‘Effective supervision of creative practice higher research degrees’, we set out to capture and share early supervisors’ insights, strategies and approaches to supporting their creative practice PhD students. From the insights we gained during the early interview process, we expanded our research methods in line with a distributed leadership model and developed a dialogic framework. This led us to unanticipated conclusions and unexpected recommendations. In this study, we primarily draw on philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogics to explain how giving precedence to the voices of supervisors not only facilitated the articulation of dispersed tacit knowledge, but also led to other discoveries. These include the nature of supervisors’ resistance to prescribed models, policies and central academic development programmes; the importance of polyvocality and responsive dialogue in enabling continued innovation in the field; the benefits to supervisors of reflecting, discussing and sharing practices with colleagues; and the value of distributed leadership and dialogue to academic development and supervision capacity building in research education.

Distributed leadership in English schools in 2014

For English primary schools, the framework of distributed leadership has been growing in status for a number of years and is now deemed to be the dominant model. However, the landscape has altered quite significantly for primary schools and their staff since the Coalition government took office in 2010, effecting fast-paced and wide-ranging reform. Therefore, it is a timely matter to consider whether a distributed model of leadership remains useful and appropriate for primary schools in 2014. In order to do so, this article identifies five defining features of the current context to use as a lens through which to scrutinise the distributed leadership model.

Making Singapore's tripartism work (faster): the formation of the Singapore National Employers' Federation in 1980

We locate the 1980 formation of the Singapore National Employers' Federation (SNEF) within a history of Singaporean tripartism. This redresses a general neglect of employer associations in that system and suggests re-conceptualising Singaporean tripartism into three overlapping phases between 1960 and 1985. The motivations for the first two are well understood. Once in government, the People's Action Party (PAP) suppressed political and union opposition and then sought legitimacy and the integration of Singapore's working class, including by providing a central role for a subordinated union movement. We argue that in a third phase, emerging during the 1970s, PAP brought employer associations into its national distributed leadership model that meshed close personal ties and institutional tripartite roles. SNEF's formation was necessary for rapid tripartite implementation of the PAP's radical shift in economic strategy.

The (non)distribution of leadership roles: Considering leadership practices and configurations

This article draws on distributed leadership and leadership-as-practice perspectives to report on a comparative case analysis of leadership configurations. The context of acquisitions is used in the study. Attention is given to the practices of members of the two leadership teams – one from each of the acquiring and acquired organizations – as they attempted to integrate their practices and redistribute leadership roles. The findings show that, despite expectations that distributed leadership would be achieved, the emergent configurations varied across the firms and consisted of distributed leadership, distributed leaderlessness, overlapping leadership and non-distributed leadership. These configurations were underpinned by members’ framings, relational practices and (non)exercise of agency. The article contributes to the leadership literature by proposing the notions of leadership deficits and leadership surpluses in configurations, by exploring how ambiguous leadership spaces are constructed, and by providing evidence of leadership models that vary in terms of conflict tractability. The study uncovers the limits of distributed leadership and shows that not all is well with distributed leadership models. The article also contributes to a broader understanding – than has been achieved through extant literature – of various potential leadership configurations that can emerge in the case of acquisitions and beyond.

Authentic leadership in English education: what do college teachers tell us?

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to report on an investigation into the perceived prevalence of authentic leadership behaviours in Sixth Form College (SFC) Principals. This research compares four different models of institutional leadership and considers which are viewed by teachers as the more common in daily practice. In doing so, the research will also touch upon the relevance of values in contemporary educational leadership.Design/methodology/approach– The research methodology adopted a mixed methods approach that elicited the views of teachers using a structured questionnaire approach together with co-constructed conversations with participants. The research involved 53 teachers from five SFCs spread across England.Findings– The findings generated from this research exercise suggest that college Principals exhibit transactional behaviours far more often than those actions associated with either transformational, distributed or authentic leadership models. This outcome may be explained in terms of the pressures acting on SFCs in an increasingly competitive and uneven education market. In short, Principals act pragmatically and instrumentally to achieve their short-term goals.Originality/value– This work follows on from previous research into servant leadership in the SFC sector. This is a sector of the English education system that attracts little coverage in the academic literature as research tends to be undertaken in the much larger schools or General Further Education sectors. Given this context, the paper represents an useful starting point for further research.

Distributed leadership

Purpose– Interdisciplinary approaches to climate change teaching are well justified and arise from the complexity of climate change challenges and the integrated problem-solving responses they demand. These approaches require academic teachers to collaborate across disciplines. Yet, the fragmentation typical of universities impedes collaborative teaching practice. This paper aims to report on the outcomes of a distributed leadership project in four Australian universities aimed at enhancing interdisciplinary climate change teaching.Design/methodology/approach– Communities of teaching practice were established at four Australian universities with participants drawn from a wide range of disciplines. The establishment and operation of these communities relied on a distributed leadership methodology which facilitates acts of initiative, innovation, vision and courage through group interaction rather than through designated hierarchical roles.Findings– Each community of practice found the distributed leadership approach overcame barriers to interdisciplinary climate change teaching. Cultivating distributed leadership enabled community members to engage in peer-led professional learning, collaborative curriculum and pedagogical development, and to facilitate wider institutional change. The detailed outcomes achieved by each community were tailored to their specific institutional context. They included the transformation of climate change curriculum, professional development in interdisciplinary pedagogy, innovation in student-led learning activities, and participation in institutional decision-making related to curriculum reform.Originality/value– Collaborative, non-traditional leadership practices have attracted little attention in research about sustainability education in university curricula. This paper demonstrates that the distributed leadership model for sustainability education reported here is effective in building capacity for interdisciplinary climate change teaching within disciplines. The model is flexible enough for a variety of institutional settings.

Not Too Young to Lead

Educational leadership is a term used to describe the work of principals and administrators. The high-stakes testing environment that has been feeding the culture of accountability in our schools has led principals to increasingly turn to a more distributed leadership model that includes their teachers, thereby expanding the concept of leadership in our schools. Despite increasing opportunities to lead, a lack of formal training often leaves educators hesitant to see themselves as leaders. Therefore, there is a compelling need to address leadership development among America's teachers even as early as the preservice stage because beginning teachers are not too young to lead. Preservice programs provide numerous opportunities to begin to expose teachers to these ideas and give them the key knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to engage in formal and informal leadership roles early in their careers. Promoting teacher leadership among beginning teachers may improve retention in teachers in the induction stage, as well as assist in closing a looming gap in leadership in our schools as many veteran teacher leaders of the baby boomer generation approach retirement.

Practitioner leadership: a missing link in leadership theory

Purpose – In the collective or distributed leadership models that are now increasingly dominant in the literature about leadership in public services, the role of the “practitioner as leader” takes on powerful significance. The purpose of this paper is to address a gap in this corpus of research, which is a critical analysis of what constitutes the role of the practitioner leader, and the strengths and limitations of these informal leaders as agents of organisational change. Design/methodology/approach – The paper develops a critical comparative analysis of the role of ordinary teachers and doctors as leaders, as a way of gaining purchase on what comprises and shapes the role of practitioner leader and the potential of this form of leadership to be a driver for quality improvements in the public sectors of education and health. Findings – Traversing traditional academic divides and comparing medical and teacher leadership provides a clearer picture of how professional and organisational culture strongly influences the roles that practitioner leaders can take up and the influence they can wield. This comparison also shows that building capacity of practitioner leadership in the public services should be approached as an expansion of professional identity, rather than an “added extra” for keen few. Originality/value – Importantly, this critical comparative review indicates that practitioner leadership is best understood and fostered as a particular ethical stance, rather than a special form of power or knowledge and that it occupies an interstitial space in between formal leadership structures and ordinary practitioners. This is both its strength and its weakness as a form of leadership.

The Ascension Health Experience

Ascension Health is the largest Catholic and nonprofit health system in the United States, encompassing 70 acute care hospitals organized into 34 health ministries. Consistent with its distributed leadership model, Ascension Health has created a Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) Advisory Council to provide strategic direction and thought leadership on major system-level initiatives that impact quality, safety, operational performance, nursing leadership, and patient care delivery. The council fosters systemwide CNO engagement and dialogue through a unique structure of regional CNO work teams called "pods," each of which is chaired by a member of the council. This communication structure has facilitated consensus on major system initiatives at Ascension Health related to clinical goals, patient safety, nursing leadership, and systemwide capital investments. This article describes the history, structure, goals, processes, and successes of the CNO Advisory Council shared governance model.

Distributing Leadership in Health and Social Care: Concertive, Conjoint or Collective?

This paper examines leadership in practice, specifically the interaction of leaders and followers, taking account of context (Spillane, J.P. (2006). Distributed Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass). Employing Gronn's dimensions of concertive action and conjoint agency (Gronn, P. (2002). Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis. Leadership Quarterly, 13, pp. 423–451), different conceptualizations of distributed leadership (DL) are examined, and the influence of a health and social care context on attempts to enact DL is analysed. In so doing, boundary conditions or the limits to distributing leadership in health and social care are identified. The analysis suggests that the collective leadership DL model presented by Denis et al. (Denis, J.‐L., Lamothe, L. and Langley, A. (2001). The dynamics of collective leadership and strategic change in pluralistic organizations. Academy of Management Journal, 44, pp. 809–837) is most likely to be enacted in the face of policy and professional pressures towards more concentrated leadership. However, where DL does not encompass conjoint agency, it will tend towards more towards ‘nobody in charge’ (Buchanan, D.A., Addicott, R., Fitzgerald, L., Ferlie, E. and Baeza, J.I. (2007). Nobody in charge: distributed change agency in healthcare. Human Relations, 60, pp. 1065–1090) or collaborative leadership (Huxham, C. and Vangen, S. (2000). Leadership in the shaping and implementation of collaboration agendas: how things happen in a (not quite) joined‐up world. Academy of Management Journal, 43, pp. 1159–1175). Following the analysis, the authors argue that researchers need to move beyond a reified concept of DL, and ask a more straightforward question of how power is distributed. As Gosling et al. suggest (Gosling, J., Bolden, R. and Petrov, G. (2009). Distributed leadership in higher education: what does it accomplish? Leadership, 5, pp. 299–310), DL evokes an aspiration for the way leadership is configured, and draws attention to iterative relations between leadership, followership and context, but it is a conception of leadership that requires unpacking. This conceptual analysis, applied to health and social care, is offered in pursuit of this aim.

Preparing for the challenge of efectively distributing leadership: Lessons learned from the creation of a leadership team

The experience of the author in creating and working with a leadership team over the course of three years in a private Mexican high school is shared. An overview of distributed leadership is provided as the theory underlying the approach taken at this new site. Information is shared on the actual institutional context of the team as well as the director’s strategy for creating and preparing the team before and during their work. In addition, the author shares the way in which the group evolved over time. Pros and cons for working under a distributed model are discussed as are recommendations for leaders and trainers of leaders. Creating a successful distributed leadership model requires a great deal of thought and effort. It is crucial that members are willing and able to make and implement wise, informed decisions. It is important, as well, to be aware of a new “worldview” that must be developed at the site in order for the work of the group to be accepted and valued.

New Schools of Thought: Developing Thinking and Learning Communities

This thesis aimed to develop new knowledge and understanding of how the characteristics of professional learning communities (PLCs) affect their everyday functioning through an investigation of teacher learning in schools developing a thinking curriculum centred on the Habits of Mind. The research project focused on two major case studies of schools engaged in the introduction of the Habits of Mind; exploring the structures, systems and dynamics that influenced teacher learning, collaboration and the growth of the PLCs. The research investigated the learning experiences of the teachers and school leaders involved in the PLCs that were established in each setting to support this process. For this reason, within each of these major studies, a number of smaller case studies were also examined, focusing on the individual experiences of these educators. As I was an active participant in the research, through my joint role as researcher and school leader responsible for leading these initiatives in each school, my own experiences are explored alongside those of the other participants in the study. The core characteristics of the PLCs explored included: the evolution of shared vision and mission; sustained action learning and experimentation; shared reflection and the collaborative exploration of mental models; distribution of leadership amongst teachers for action and change; investigation and application of systems thinking; and the development and diversification of professional practice. The findings from the study provided evidence that the characteristics of the PLCs worked to support professional learning in relation to both the Habits of Mind and school improvement in each setting, but found that variables in the implementation of these characteristics, such as leadership support for the vision and mission of the PLC, had a marked impact on the results. The wider adoption of distributed leadership models and consistent engagement with systems thinking approaches within the schools were also found to be highly significant influences upon the efficacy and durability of the PLCs. In addition, the study concluded that teacher inquiry into the Habits of Mind in each setting worked to not only deepen understanding of teaching and learning in relation to the development of effective learning dispositions, but also play an important formative influence on the growth and dynamics of the PLCs themselves. Conclusions and recommendations from the study were made to help inform the further development of PLCs focused on the Habits of Mind, skilful thinking and effective learning dispositions in schools; as well as contributing to understanding of effective models for the professional development of teachers, organizational improvement and school-based, practitioner research.