The study focuses on the role of Transformational Leadership (TL) practices and Distributive Leadership (DL) practices on Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). The objectives of the study are to understand the global trends, challenges associated with the leadership practices and opportunities for TL and DL practices in HEIs. A Systematic Literature Review has been conducted after inclusion and exclusion criteria. The analysis of 16 sources has helped in understanding the importance of Vision-centric leadership practices for academic institutions so that the leaders are aware of the changes that can be adopted for higher educational standards. However, changing dynamics and ambiguity can create issues in leadership practices. TL and DL practices offer various opportunities in the form of innovation, sustainability, collaborative working and organisational commitment through knowledge sharing in HEIs. This study suggests that university leaders and policymakers should adopt an integrated leadership approach that combines visionary transformation with collaborative governance to enhance institutional performance and adaptability.

The study aims to explore the role of distributed leadership (DIL) among employees in private hospitals in improving work environment conditions (WEC) through innovation readiness. This objective was established to address a significant problem, namely: (Is there a role for DIL in improving WEC through the mediating role of innovation readiness among employees in private hospitals?). To tackle this problem, a descriptive-analytical approach was adopted using a questionnaire as the tool for data collection. Accordingly, 100 questionnaires were distributed, 79 were retrieved, 66 of which were valid and 13 were invalid. For the purpose of data analysis, the SPSS & AMOS package was employed to determine the levels of the study variables. Accordingly, the study produced several results, foremost of which is the existence of a correlation between DIL, WEC, and Innovation Readiness. This indicates that Innovation Readiness contributes to enhancing the relationship between DIL and WEC, highlighting the prioritisation of private hospitals on improving these variables through enhancing openness to innovation and flexibility of administration among employees. This leads to building supportive functional and supervisory quality, participation in informed decision-making, which improves collaboration within work teams, directly reflecting on creating a behavioural and material work environment aimed at achieving the organisation's long-term vision. The study also offered several recommendations, the most important of which focused on the necessity of continuously developing employees’ capabilities by encouraging them to participate in ongoing training courses to enhance their skills and Innovation abilities, thereby improving working and organisational conditions in hospitals and providing greater opportunities for employee development and utilising their capabilities in a manner that serves the organisation's objectives..

ABSTRACT This qualitative case study critically examines how leadership at the Early Education Center, a university laboratory school affiliated with a midwestern university in the US, utilized research data to implement strategies to foster equity and stronger collaboration between educators and parents who identified as immigrants, refugees, asylees, and international students and scholars. Their ways of knowing and lived experiences were not reflected throughout the school community, and no parents in this group held leadership roles, which was concerning, given that the school had implemented a distributed leadership model. By implementing leadership practices informed by research, school leadership took the first steps toward creating a more equitable system of collaboration with these parents. This study undertakes a reflective examination of how these practices were or were not implemented in a systemic and equitable manner. Three strategies illustrate how the school has developed a deeper understanding of how to create more equitable and reciprocal relationships with all families. Research findings illustrate positive outcomes but also make visible instances in which school leadership fell short of their stated goals.

Background: Cross-sector integrated care is increasingly seen as the route to improving health, advancing health equity, and reducing care fragmentation. While considerable literature has examined characteristics of successful integrated care initiatives, less is known about how sectoral, organizational, and professional boundaries may be overcome to support care unification. The field of health services research has much to learn from the rapid collaborative response that ensued during COVID-19. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the impact of cross-sector integration utilized during COVID-19 at the individual and organizational level, through the Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation to change behaviour model. Approach: An exploratory case study was conducted with an inter-sectoral working group who engaged with and provided vaccines to a community of high COVID-19 incidence from April – September 2021 in Toronto, Canada. This study used three sources of data: key informant interviews (n= 10), key stakeholder interviews (n=4), organizational participants (n=2) and a review of relevant documents. Participants included front-line workers, managers, directors and executive directors from hospitals, community health centres, social care, government, and faith organizations. Data were inductively analyzed using Braun and Clark’s (2006) theoretical thematic analysis. Results: Findings suggest that the success of this community centred initiative rested on the remarkable capability and collective efficacy of the inter-sectoral working group. Participants’ professional identity served as a key intrinsic motivator to support the achievement of normative integration during this rapid collaborative response. The fluid interplay of social processes known to facilitate cross-sector collaboration, namely distributive leadership, and informal organizing were central features to this initiative, where community knowledge was considered an essential resource by working group members and system leaders. While participants were proud of their accomplishments, many were disappointed with limited system learnings to advance integrated care, with communities, beyond COVID-19. Implications: Recommendations include a call for health system leaders to increasingly draw on opportunities for collective sectoral organizing grounded in complexity thinking, where sentinel focus areas are addressed through population health approaches. Through these collaborative acts, there is opportunity to bridge divides, drawing on internal motivations and collective governance to generate learning inclusive of community, addressing value for the system as a whole.

Background: Integrated care systems aim to improve healthcare outcomes by fostering collaboration between various stakeholders, including healthcare providers, payers, and patients. However, the complexity of these systems often leads to tensions and conflicts of interest, which can either hinder or drive innovation depending on how they are managed. Approach: In 2023, we examined the role of tensions and conflicts of interest in collaborative innovation processes in healthcare, particularly in the 194 integrated care projects funded by the German Innovation Fund. Based on a comprehensive survey of stakeholders involved in these projects (n=58), the study demonstrated that actively managing tensions between partners—such as healthcare providers, payers, and patient representatives—was crucial for the success of integrated care systems. Results: We identified best practices in good governance, emphasizing that tensions could be harnessed as drivers of innovation rather than being avoided. Clear accountability, transparency, and effective regulatory frameworks were highlighted as essential conditions for the success of collaborative projects. These governance principles provided a structure within which tensions could be productively addressed, leading to innovative solutions. Implications: The study underscored the importance of leadership in integrated care. A distributive and supportive leadership model, which fostered collaboration across all levels of stakeholders, was identified as a key success factor. The study showed that developing leadership capabilities not only at the management level but across the entire system was necessary to effectively address the challenges of integrated care. This type of leadership supported the development of sustainable partnerships and cultivated a culture of trust and shared responsibility.

Teacher leadership (TL) significantly promotes school efficiency and academic achievement, and thus, it is essential to focus on multi-level leadership in schools, especially teacher leadership. However, TL development encounters considerable challenges worldwide, notably in Bangladesh. Using thematic analysis as a data analysis tool and the four-factor model of teacher leadership (TL) as a conceptual framework, this qualitative study employed a purposeful sampling of five secondary school teachers and explored the dismal reality of TL practices and their associated impediments to flourishing in secondary schools in Bangladesh. The study revealed several potential barriers to TL development that included: demotivation, principals’ egoism and bureaucratic attitude, financial challenges, socio-cultural and socio-psychological constraints, colleagues’ professional jealousy, lack of training, and institutional recognition. Thus, in the four-factor model of teacher leadership, though Sharing Expertise (SE) and Principal Selection (PS) factors proved to be consistent with the study, Sharing Leadership (SL) and Supra-Practitioner (SP) factors were found to be inconsistent. Thus, in light of the theoretical implications, this study offers suggestions for school leaders to bring attitudinal changes toward the TL concept, and in top-down authoritarian practices through Distributive Leadership. Moreover, education authoritarian initiatives are recommended to ensure effective leadership training for school leaders and teachers to a broader extent.

IntroductionThe professional collaboration of teachers is highly important for the success of educational outcomes. This study aimed to determine the conditions under which distributed leadership influenced the collaboration of teachers. The study focused on identifying the previously undetermined complex relationships between distributive leadership, teacher professional collaboration, teaching enthusiasm, and teacher optimism, which were found in the literature to be associated with improving the quality of education, enhancing teaching, and achieving successful student outcomes.MethodsData collected from 547 teachers working at 38 different public schools in 20 provinces across Türkiye were analyzed in a cross-sectional manner using the bootstrap method. The effects of distributed leadership on teacher collaboration were examined using a moderated mediation model in which teaching enthusiasm was the mediator variable, and teacher optimism was the moderator variable.ResultsThe results revealed that distributed leadership had direct and indirect significant effects on teacher collaboration through the mediation of teaching enthusiasm. Additionally, teacher optimism plays a moderating role in both the effect of distributed leadership on teaching enthusiasm and the effect of distributed leadership on teacher collaboration through teaching enthusiasm. In other words, the positive effects of distributed leadership became stronger in cases where teacher optimism levels were high.DiscussionThe leadership approach which distributes positive emotions such as optimism and enthusiasm, which are at the core of positive psychology, and leadership roles to all teachers in the school, can help increase collaboration among teachers and positive workplace behaviors. This research indicates that teachers being enthusiastic while teaching and taking an active role in school management may enable them to be more collaborative in fulfilling these roles and other teaching roles. Teachers’ enthusiasm for teaching can function as an emotional mechanism that connects teachers’ collaboration with a leadership approach that distributes leadership throughout the school. Moreover, when teachers are more optimistic, they trust school administrators’ leadership practices more, participate more in management, and can teach more collaboratively and enthusiastically. Future research may further examine these associations across different cultural contexts.

Although elementary school principals’ leadership practices have been widely examined, studies that simultaneously test the effects of transformational and distributed leadership on students’ academic and non-academic achievement in the Indonesian context, particularly in Barru Regency, remain limited. This study aimed to analyze the influence of principals’ transformational and distributed leadership on the academic and non-academic achievement of elementary school students in Barru Regency. The research was conducted from October to November 2025 using a quantitative approach with an explanatory survey design, involving 210 teachers from 15 public elementary schools selected through proportional random sampling. Data were collected using standardized questionnaires and documentation of students’ academic scores and non-academic achievements, and were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling–Partial Least Squares (SEM-PLS). The measurement model results showed that all indicators met the validity and reliability criteria (outer loading > 0.70; AVE > 0.50; CR > 0.70). The structural model yielded R² values of 0.64 for academic achievement and 0.58 for non-academic achievement. Hypothesis testing indicated that transformational leadership had a significant effect on academic achievement (β = 0.45; p < 0.001) and non-academic achievement (β = 0.32; p < 0.001), while distributed leadership also had a significant effect on academic achievement (β = 0.29; p < 0.001) and non-academic achievement (β = 0.41; p < 0.001). These findings contribute to the development of educational leadership theory by integrating visionary transformational leadership and collaborative distributed leadership in the comprehensive enhancement of learning outcomes. The study concludes that the synergy of these two leadership approaches plays an important role in improving students’ academic and non-academic achievement and recommends strengthening principal leadership development programs in Barru Regency.

The transformation towards the remote work has revolutionized traditional leadership strategies and created an urgent need for innovative distributed team leadership methods and organizational performance maintenance systems. Researchers aim to analyse how leadership functions in remote work platforms their effects on workplace transformations. Research seeks to determine successful leadership approaches in remote environments while examining leadership challenges and remote work advantages and measuring its lasting impact on worker engagement and company performance and team organizational culture. This research investigates remote work success through case studies of implementing organizations while conducting surveys that include leaders and employees from various sectors. Proofs about virtual leadership excellence come from structured interviews and employee feedback reviews and quantitative performance measurements. The research shows transformational and servant leadership practices excel in virtual settings which focus on building trust alongside digital collaboration and strong communication practices. The analysis indicates several essential remote work difficulties concerning employee retention and fair career development and remote worker stress management. The analysis shows how technology-based leadership systems that incorporate AI tracking data and virtual communication tools will reshape future work environments. Organizations need to create leadership development programs matching remote and hybrid models while developing leader digital literacy and maintaining employee wellness for building long-term high-performing remote teams. The research findings enhance the ongoing dialogue about adaptive leadership in digital times through actionable guidelines that help companies direct their future workplace development.

Purpose The wellbeing of healthcare workers is increasingly recognized as foundational to high-quality care and sustainable health systems. While various leadership frameworks promote wellbeing, there remains a gap in system-wide strategies that integrate equity, psychological safety and health promotion into leadership practice. This paper aims to address that gap by adapting the Okanagan Charter, originally developed for health-promoting universities, into a novel framework for health-promoting leadership in healthcare. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper reinterprets the principles of the Okanagan Charter through the lens of inclusive, distributed and compassionate leadership. The authors adapt an established six-domain model to the health leadership context: embed health in all policies, adapt spaces to promote wellbeing, create thriving communities and cultures, support meaningful personal and professional development, promote engagement with health services and collaborate in continuous improvement and evaluation. For each domain, they provide theoretical rationale, leadership strategies and practice-based illustrations. Findings This paper critically examines the applicability of the Okanagan Charter within healthcare leadership, highlights practical implementation challenges and presents a revised leadership case study grounded in real-world complexity. The findings demonstrate the utility of the six-domain model in guiding leaders to embed wellbeing into everyday practice. Originality/value This paper advances existing scholarship by explicitly extending Okanagan Charter-aligned work into the domain of healthcare leadership. It offers a clear, theory-informed roadmap for leaders to integrate wellbeing, equity and health promotion into the fabric of organizational life, positioning health-promoting leadership as a strategic imperative for resilient, inclusive and high-performing health systems.

ABSTRACT This study examines how distributed leadership (DL) is enacted by school principals in two contrasting education systems: Ireland and Türkiye. It investigates how policy environments and institutional structures shape leadership practices across these contexts. The findings indicate that principals in Türkiye experience highly centralized governance structures as constraining the enactment of DL, whereas principals in Ireland emphasize ongoing efforts to align policy intentions with school-level practices. The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating how DL is shaped by context-specific policy and cultural dynamics, underscoring the importance of context-sensitive leadership development and support structures across education systems.

The implementation of School-Based Management (SBM) positions principal leadership as a critical factor in improving educational quality. This article aims to analyze the strategic role, relevant models, and leadership challenges in strengthening SBM, with a focus on integrating spiritual values ​​in Buddhist schools. Using a qualitative literature study method with thematic analysis of current literature, the results show that principals must act as learning leaders, change agents, and resource managers. The success of SBM requires the synergy of transformational (vision-building), instructional (learning-focused), and distributive (collaborative) leadership models. In the Buddhist context, the spiritual values ​​of mettā (loving-kindness), karuṇā (compassion), upekkhā (equanimity), and paññā (wisdom) can be integrated to strengthen the ethical and relational foundations of all three models. Implementation challenges include leadership competency gaps, teacher resistance, limited resources, administrative burdens, and low community participation. Strategies to address these challenges require a holistic approach that goes beyond technical solutions to encompass sustainable capacity building, digitalization, the creation of a supportive school climate, and authentic community partnerships. This article concludes that strengthening MBS is essentially strengthening school leadership that is contextual, integrative, and based on values ​​to achieve holistic education.

This research examines how distributed leadership shapes organizational citizenship behavior within Türkiye’s software development sector, with work engagement positioned as a mediating variable. As authority disperses from a singular leader toward a collective, collaborative framework, distributed leadership becomes ever more salient in agile, knowledge-intensive businesses such as software development. Data were collected through an online questionnaire completed by 273 software practitioners positioned in different locations in Türkiye. The sample encompassed a spectrum of occupational roles, educational attainments, and professional longevity, thereby reflecting the sector’s heterogeneous character. Results highlight that higher levels of distributed leadership are associated with higher work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. A major distributed leadership impact on organizational citizenship behavior is channeled through work engagement, which underscores the cognitive and affective pathways through which distributed leadership facilitates organizational citizenship behavior. These findings contribute to the leadership literature by showing how distributed leadership takes advantage of intrinsic motivation and discretionary effort, particularly in highly innovative and collaborative environments, and they align with results reported in previous studies on leadership, engagement, and citizenship behavior. From a managerial perspective, the study recommends the promotion of shared decision-making and engagement as means to enhance work engagement. This research fills a critical gap as it is the first empirical study to test the mediating role of work engagement in the relationship between distributed leadership and organizational citizenship behavior within Türkiye’s software development companies.

This cross-national study investigates how teacher leadership (TL) influences distributed leadership (DL) in K–12 schools across six Arab countries, with teacher wellbeing (TWB) positioned as a central mediating factor. Drawing on a research-grounded conceptual model, the findings reveal that TWB significantly enhances the impact of TL on DL, particularly when driven by professional growth, learning leadership, and school community support. Notably, collaboration and communication—though linked to wellbeing—do not independently foster DL, exposing limitations in prevailing assumptions about their sufficiency. This study challenges the conventional belief that collaboration alone can catalyze leadership distribution, arguing instead for holistic, wellbeing-centered leadership models. TWB emerges not merely as a byproduct of leadership practices but as a pivotal enabler of distributed leadership. The findings offer implications for rethinking leadership development policies, urging educational systems to center teacher support and wellbeing as strategic levers for systemic transformation and sustainable school leadership.

Systems leadership for quality in health care: from principles to actions.

Purpose Although theoretical approaches widely recognize that leadership can shape school culture, empirical research on how culture is associated with the emergence and functioning of distributed leadership and how this form of leadership contributes to organizational justice remains limited. However, in school contexts, cultural dynamics are directly associated with how leadership is experienced and how justice is perceived. By challenging prevailing assumptions in the literature, this research seeks to provide empirical insight into how cultural dynamics distribute leadership practices and, in turn, are associated with perceptions of justice within school settings. Design/methodology/approach The study employed a temporal cross-sectional design to investigate the mediating relationship among school culture, organizational justice and distributed leadership variables. The final data consisted of three scales administered to 391 teachers in Gaziantep, Türkiye. Findings The results indicated that distributed leadership mediated the relationship between school culture and organizational justice, and this mediation remained robust after controlling for gender, school type and socioeconomic context. These results contribute to empirical testing of the relationship between school culture and leadership and of the role of distributed leadership as an organizational property. Practical implications Considering that leadership practices are a key factor in the transmission of culture, focusing on understanding culture within leadership-based in-service training programs could be a strategic step for policymakers to positively influence employees’ perceptions of the organization and, consequently, organizational behaviour. Social implications Integrating efforts to understand and strengthen school culture into professional development courses may facilitate the positioning of distributed leadership in schools and contribute to improving organizational outcomes. Originality/value To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to use school culture as a root metaphor in line with the anthropological approach to the culture-leadership relationship and to treat distributed leadership as a mediating variable. Leadership cannot directly manipulate school culture; rather, culture evolves through shared practices and meanings. Hence, it significantly contributes to the educational leadership and management literature. In addition, this study is essential in that its results confirm Schein’s culture leadership model.

Research on school leadership shows that effective leadership is crucial to the development of successful schools and improvement of teaching and learning. Principals play a vital role as leaders in high schools in Saudi Arabia. As Saudi Arabia faces the challenge of changes in education, principals have to attain knowledge of the present leadership theory and research in order to acquire and obtain a theoretical understanding of leadership approaches that are able to make schools more successful. The purpose of this study is to explore how principals in Saudi Arabia understand leadership theory and the extent to which they use the distributed leadership approach. It also explores the leadership practices of principals in the context of their Saudi schools and the ways in which they involve their teachers in leadership activities.In this study, the participants are the principals and teachers from three high schools in Makkah province of Saudi Arabia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the principals, and a questionnaire was completed by the teachers. The findings of this study show that the principals have sufficient knowledge for leading their schools; most of their leadership skills have been developed through experience and are concentrated on educational leadership. However, the principals lack theoretical knowledge of multiple approaches and school leadership conceptions, since they have not had opportunities for formal leadership programmes. The results of the questionnaire show that there is some practice of distributed leadership in the schools.

This paper explores the connections between knowledge management (KM), digital literacy (DL), organizational culture (OC) and digital transformation (DT). It investigates the role of KM on the usage of DL and OC and how both are interplaying determinants of successful digital change. To examine these relationships, the study conducted a path analysis of the path coefficients and coefficient of determination using the SmartPLS 4 software based on the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The survey was web-based research that gathered data of 600 faculty members in 15 publicly-financed universities in Islamabad, Pakistan. The findings underscore the importance of having all-round training markets to improve digital literacy to consolidate knowledge management strategies. Besides, the organizational culture should be democratic and adaptable in order to transform efficiently in digital form. To realise successful digital transformation, it is important that knowledge management techniques be combined with organizational change initiatives by organisations. The report as well suggests frequent monitoring and evaluation to determine the effectiveness of these interventions and introduce relevant amendments towards continued improvement. This study highlights the interrelationships that exist between the management of knowledge, deep learning, organizational culture, and digital transformation, and a comprehensive approach to knowledge and digital technology-driven initiatives is highlighted. The results indicate that knowledge management has significant positive influences on decision making, which intermediately impact decision taking in a good way. Moreover, KM creates a facilitating organizational culture, which is critical as an intermediary between distributed leadership and digital transformation.

ABSTRACT This qualitative, interview-based study investigates how distributed leadership (DL) is conceptualised and practised within public universities in Jiangsu Province, China. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with five university presidents and fifteen faculty members, the research applies grounded theory methods—including open, axial and selective coding—to develop an interpretive framework linking cognition, behaviour and outcomes. The analysis shows that DL enhances teaching innovation and research productivity through improved communication, resource allocation and collaborative teamwork. Its effectiveness depends on four contextual enablers: organisational culture, resource availability, individual leadership capacity and technological integration. Comparative insights reveal both alignments and tensions between presidents' strategic perspectives and teachers' operational experiences. While DL supports institutional adaptability to digitalisation and internationalisation, challenges remain in uneven resource distribution and occasional inefficiencies in shared decision-making. The study highlights the importance of inclusive organisational cultures, targeted leadership development and equitable resource mechanisms for advancing DL in Chinese higher education.

This study investigates how primary school leaders build high levels of faculty trust by integrating Transformational (TL), Instructional (IL) and Distributed Leadership (DL) within a highly centralised education system. Using a sequential mixed-methods multi-case design, survey data from 1320 teachers across 85 public schools identified five high-trust sites for in-depth qualitative inquiry through interviews and observations. Principals in these schools enacted context-responsive blends of leadership; articulated shared moral purpose and vision (TL), sustained instructional quality and credibility (IL) and empowered teachers through participatory decision-making (DL). Trust functioned simultaneously as a precondition and a product of these practices, reinforcing collaboration, collective efficacy and professional learning despite systemic constraints. Contextual variables – particularly governance centralisation, school size and relational culture – shaped how integration occurred. School leaders can strengthen trust by modelling fairness and transparency, engaging meaningfully with teaching and learning and sharing decision-making that recognises teacher expertise. Leadership preparation programmes should subsequently prioritise the development of these relational, instructional and collaborative competencies that enable principals to build cohesive, trust-rich school cultures within policy-driven environments. Ultimately, the study advances understanding of how integrated, trust-based leadership sustains professional cohesion and organisational resilience, offering a transferable model for leadership in both centralised and decentralised education systems.