Enactment Of Leadership Research Articles

Promoting leadership for learning in Nigeria: The interplay of leadership mastery experience and leader self-efficacy

Leadership for learning has emerged as a holistic leadership behaviour that combines aspects of instructional leadership, transformational leadership and shared leadership. Little is known about how this type of leadership develops and what antecedents are important. Following the rationales of Social Cognitive (Career) Theory and applying Chan and Drasgow's leader development model, we examine how leadership mastery experience and leader self-efficacy affect leadership for learning in Nigerian schools. We divide leaders’ self-efficacy into the belief that they have the necessary skills and abilities to be successful as leaders (leader self-regulatory self-efficacy) and the belief that the actions they take as leaders will have the desired effect (leader action self-efficacy). Using structural equation modelling, our results show that both leadership mastery experience and leader self-efficacy are relevant antecedents of leadership for learning, with self-efficacy mediating the effects of experience on leadership. Our results suggest efficiency–performance spirals and illustrate how important it is for the enactment of leadership for learning to believe in one's ability to competently perform various critical leadership actions.

Enactment of Transformational School Leadership—Insights from Primary School and System Leaders

Transformational leadership has been proposed as an approach that can inspire effective change. How this is manifest in schools is understudied in Irish primary schools, which have undergone significant change in recent years. The focus of this qualitative research study was primary school and system leaders’ knowledge of transformational school leadership, perceived benefits, limitations, and feasibility, and how transformational school leadership actually manifests in practice. Participants were recruited using purposive sampling. In-depth interviews were carried out with principals, deputy and assistant principals, and former school inspectors, with the interviews aligned to the following research questions: (1) How can we characterize school and system leaders’ knowledge, understanding and perceptions regarding the feasibility of transformational school leadership? (2) How do transformational school-leadership behaviours manifest in primary-school settings? Data analysis yielded the following themes and sub-themes: (1) Understanding of transformational school leadership: (i) transformation, change and growth, (ii) relationships, (iii) vision, mission, and goals, (iv) leading; (2) Perceptions of feasibility of transformational school leadership: (i) realism, (ii) people and relationships, (iii) practical challenges; (3) Benefits of transformational school leadership: (i) aspiration, (ii) culture, (iii) motivation and modelling, (iv) school community, (v) delivering quality learning; (4) Limitations of transformational school leadership: (i) personality, (ii) pressure, (iii) slow process, (iv) unexpected variables; (5) Manifestations of transformational school-leadership: (i) idealised influence, (ii) inspirational motivation, (iii) individualised consideration, (iv) intellectual stimulation, (v) school development, (vi) improving curricular offerings. Participants’ positive disposition to transformational school leadership was encouraging and suggests the need for further research, specifically to examine potential synergies between transformational and distributed school leadership.

Being Authentic: Gender Identity, Leadership Enactment, and the Case Study of Indonesian Women Newsroom Leaders

ABSTRACT Globally, news organizations often maintain a male-dominated work culture, with a pronounced preference for men over women in leadership roles, mirroring trends observed in Indonesian newsrooms. This study challenges the misconception that women are less capable of leading newsrooms. Through in-depth interviews with 31 Indonesian women newsroom leaders, this research explores how women newsroom leaders in Indonesia deal with newsroom inequality and in the process, how they perform and negotiate their leadership roles in relations to their gender identity. Drawing from the theoretical framework of identity and anchoring on the concept of authenticity, this study identifies the varying understandings among these women on what it means to be a “true” newsroom leader and their tactical negotiations between their gender and leadership identities. Some respondents dismiss gender differences but enact masculine leadership features to belong in the professional context while others evoke their gender identity and establish femininity as part of their professional identity in newsroom. This research adds to the thin literature on women leadership in the journalism industry and contributes to the empirical and theoretical discussions on the different approaches to leadership as they pertain to gender.

Teacher leadership in professional learning communities in early childhood education: A Chinese perspective

To address the research gap in exploring teacher leadership and professional learning community (PLC) in early childhood education in China, this study explored how PLC members enacted leadership and how preschool principals influenced the enactment of such leadership. Purposive sampling was used to select research participants based on the current local governmental preschool quality ratings: Excellent, Good, and Average. Data were collected from three public preschools with corresponding levels of autonomy and hierarchical structures, and semistructured interviews were conducted with nine preschool practitioners. In terms of roles, PLC leaders served as pseudo leaders, and classroom teachers served as active learners but passive leaders in PLCs. PLC members implemented strategies that included the provision of learning support and communication to facilitate PLCs. Although preschool principals were found to serve as helmsmen, they positively managed the learning programmes and invited experts to conduct teacher training.

Weary of the harsh realities of people management? Leadership development as cultivating a taste for muddy situations

Practitioners face a wealth of perspectives on leadership, each highlighting different dimensions to attend to as a leader. Contemporary literature, for instance, emphasizes aspects such as authenticity, vision, relationships, and being a servant leader. Regarding the process of becoming a leader, it suggests a path involving changing roles, rebuilding one’s identity, and becoming a quiet servant of one’s followers. However appropriate, these prescriptions often fail to address the misplaced expectations of practitioners, mostly lack of preparedness for people management, for its gritty realities and frustrations which sometimes resembles being dragged in the mud. This study proposes a framework whereby enactment of leadership necessitates adequate motivation and expectations. As leaders behave in patterns of cognitive, emotional, and appreciative perceptions, it proposes to approach leaders’ development as an issue of aesthetics, of taste development. The framework identifies different possible aesthetics of leadership, and suggests that the most operant aesthetic of leadership would taste less of grandiosity than of hardships.

Constructions of Solidarity and Leadership of Powerful Global Leaders in Post Pandemic Recovery Speeches

The COVID-19 witnessed varied enactment of leadership by political leaders around the world in response to its threat. With COVID-19 recovery policies shining a spotlight on government’s future action, the leadership of global political figures is once again scrutinised on how they ‘build back better’ the damages caused by the pandemic. This study analyses the COVID-19 post- recovery speeches of the world’s most powerful leaders to gain an understanding of their enactment of discursive leadership. Focusing on solidarity, this study elucidates the processes and identifies how it is linguistically constituted as part of their aims to create bonds with international allies. The analysis reveals that the construction of solidarity is done through storytelling and, proverbs and metaphors. The findings have led to a deeper understanding of discursive leadership and solidarity practices in political discourse, and is hoped to be useful to researchers to understand exemplary discursive practices pertinent to solidarity building.

When leaders disappoint: rejection and denial of leadership roles in international politics

International leadership failure by states is an underdeveloped concept in International Relations. Existing approaches commonly equate leadership with hegemony, arguing that leadership success and failure are contingent on primacy or shared material interests among states. In this article, we introduce a role theoretical approach, which defines international leadership as a social role that emerges from shared expectations among states pertaining to leadership purpose, group cohesion and time horizon. Accordingly, leadership failure occurs when role expectations between states diverge and states are unable to generate commensurate role-taking via alter-casting. Four leader-follower constellations can be distinguished: leadership enactment, denial, rejection and vacuum. The paper utilizes this theoretical heuristic to understand two cases of leadership failure. The first case involves Brazil’s attempted leadership role in response to the Latin American migration crisis following the political crisis in Venezuela. The second case examines Indonesia’s attempted leadership role in the South China Sea dispute. The empirical findings contribute to existing work on hegemony and leadership in international relations theory by showing that leadership failure comes in different variants and these variants are contingent on shared role expectations and alter-casting capacity of states involved.

‘Do you want me to take over?’

This article is concerned with the in situ negotiation of epistemic primacy in the context of medical emergencies. It investigates the mobilisation of questions and positioning in the material space as mechanisms for claiming control and for co-constructing epistemic authority. We bring together two high-risk, high-pressure emergency contexts – obstetrics and major trauma – and show the patterns that emerged from a bottom-up interactional sociolinguistic analysis of the data. We draw on a corpus of approximately 400 questions from a sample of ten teams; we zoom in on the role of the institutionally defined team leader, while special attention is also paid to the ways in which institutional power asymmetries are negotiated across the team in leadership enactment. We discuss the typology of questions that emerged from our data on a spectrum from a not knowing (K?) to a knowing (K+) status. Our analysis demonstrates consistent patterns in displays of epistemic primacy, with team leaders raising most of the questions indicating a K+ status across contexts. Further, we show that verbal claims of epistemic primacy are conditioned upon team leaders’ positioning at specific material zones of the emergency room as an integral part of doing their role.

Exploring Teacher’s Professional Identity in Relationship to Leadership: A Latent Profile Analysis

As a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, which has affected the whole world, teacher leadership has gained more significance. Teacher leadership is a multidimensional concept. While some teachers exercise leadership only at the classroom level, others exercise leadership at a macro level. This level of leadership enactment is directly related to how teachers construct their professional identity in relation to leadership. This study aims to explore the leadership-related professional identities of teachers who came to the fore, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic period by using latent profile analysis. The data were collected from a sample of 710 teachers. Teachers completed the Teacher Leadership Behavior Scale, which measures teacher leadership behaviors at four levels: classroom, parental, micro-level, and macro-level. Participants also completed the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, the teacher self-efficacy scale, the openness to authority scale, and the job satisfaction scale. As a result of latent profile analysis, three distinct profiles of teacher leadership identity emerged: those who exercise leadership at a minimum level, an intermediate level, and a maximum level across all four levels of teacher leadership. These profiles were labeled as “restricted professionality”, “intermediate professionality”, and “extended professionality”, drawing upon Hoyle’s conceptualization of teacher professional identity. These findings suggest that teachers construct their identities differently regarding teacher leadership. It is essential for school leaders to first explore the different levels of professional identity and tailor their professional development activities accordingly.

Advancing the Institution and the Individual: Women’s Enactment of Equity-Minded Leadership in Colleges and Universities

ABSTRACT Across colleges and universities, there is a need to foster campus leadership that is diverse, responsive, and effective. In the face of these needs, there is a lack of current research about how newly appointed campus leaders develop and enact their leadership practices in support of higher education institutions and their members. The purpose of this qualitative study, guided by Feminist Organization Theory, was to generate knowledge about women’s approaches to new leadership roles in today’s higher education environment. Interviews with women with scholarly backgrounds in higher education administration who had taken on new leadership roles generated the emergent Institutional-Individual Leadership Model, which should be tested and refined through further research.

Lone Leaders of Leaderless Resistors: A Theory of Informal Leadership in Contemporary Terrorism and Political Violence

Previous studies found that informal leadership emerges in leaderless resistance movements. However, its boundaries – i.e. the conditions in which leaders can be successful – remain obscure. This paper develops a theoretical framework to then apply it to the Informal Anarchist Federation. The findings suggest that leaders are more likely to succeed when conforming to the movement’s core values. Moreover, informal leadership is context-dependent, temporary, and spontaneous, but also ubiquitous since any militant can be a leader and followers play a crucial role in co-creating the enactment of leadership. The paper argues that understanding the leadership’s boundaries is crucial for counterterrorism purposes.

Talking leadership into practice: the enactment of teacher leadership in a networked learning community

ABSTRACT The literature suggests that professional learning networks contribute to teacher learning, school, and system improvement. This paper examines the enactment of teacher leadership in a networked learning community (NLC) setting in Singapore, specifically how teacher leadership is enacted through the artifact of talk. In this case study, teacher talk was transcribed and analysed using an interactional approach, which views talk as social practice. The findings show that teachers enact leadership by engaging in pedagogically productive talk, deconstructing their practice, supporting their peers’ learning, and engaging in professional learning themselves. Although there is distribution of leadership, the close examination of talk highlighted differences in leadership practices due to differences in the roles that teachers play or the context of the talk. In addition, the focus on talk prompts a critical reflection of what leadership entails, in that what is not said could be as important as what is said and can constitute demonstration of leadership. The study suggests there is value in integrating research on teacher leadership with research on teacher facilitation of learning in networks and communities. Facilitating learning communities might be a promising in-situ approach to develop teacher leadership.

“My supervisors first check school cleanliness”: Factors inhibiting instructional leadership practices in Northern Sindh, Pakistan

Amid the growing concerns of educational stakeholders about the academic achievements of students, educational literature, especially coming from the developed context, portrays instructional leadership as a desirable model with the potential to contribute to the improved capacity of teachers, ultimately leading to enhanced student achievements. However, research shows that school leadership is context-dependent, and different contexts and cultures differently influence the enactment of instructional leadership. Against this background, the current study explored the factors inhibiting instructional leadership practices in the developing world, taking Pakistan as a case. The research used a qualitative approach and case study method concentrating on the phenomenon of instructional leadership in a semi-government school in the context of Northern Sindh, Pakistan. Considering the area under investigation, the school manager and principal were purposefully selected as the research participants. Ten teachers were also consulted to enrich and triangulate data. The school leaders (manager and principal) were interviewed individually using semi-structured interviews, whereas the teachers were interviewed in groups. The emerging data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The results showed that the school leaders’ instructional leadership practices were mainly inhibited by their partial understanding of their responsibilities, limited exposure to capacity building opportunities, teachers’ attitudes, and a communication gap between the school and the upper management responsible for overseeing the academic activities of the school. The paper argues that unless these influential factors are considered by policy makers and educational leaders, it is very unlikely for the school leaders to exercise instructional leadership in this part of the world.

Digital leadership enactment in the construction industry: barriers undermining effective transformation

PurposeIn the past decade, transforming key processes and activities towards a more digital nature has been the focus of most industries to exploit the associated advantages. Despite that, organisations in the construction sector are lagging the list of early adopters. The slow rate of a fundamental digital transformation is being linked to the challenges facing an effective leadership. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to shed light on the barriers to digital leadership enactment in the construction industry. Limited research has empirically analysed and discussed these barriers to explain the low transformation rate in the existing body of knowledge.Design/methodology/approachThis paper empirically investigates the perspectives of construction industry professionals acquiring various roles in the industry. This study captured the views of 38 participants, adopting a qualitative methodological approach to detail the barriers and explain the slow digital transformation rate.FindingsFindings are grouped into five themes: leadership characteristics, management and organisational issues, resource constraints, technological issues and risk perceptions. The findings are helpful to business leaders, researchers, trainers and educators to develop measures to encourage leaders in the industry to be at the forefront of digital transformation in their organisations.Originality/valueLiterature, however, is discreet in reflecting the challenges and barriers facing today's leadership in facilitating digital transformation among construction stakeholders. This paper provides insights into the variables that may be undermining wider digital adoption across the construction sector's organisations.

When Leadership Attacks: Stories of Surviving the Worst Bosses

When Leadership Attacks: Stories of Surviving the Worst Bosses

Influence of principal leadership across contexts on the science learning of students

The present study provides insights on the influence of family socioeconomic and school resources on principal leadership and, in turn, the influence of principal leadership on the science learning of students. The study uses data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2015 (248,620 students and 9370 principals) from 35 developed countries. Three-level structural equation modeling indicates that family and school contexts influenced the enactment of principal leadership. Specifically, principals were able to exercise leadership (envisioning, conducting instructional management, promoting professional development, and advocating empowerment) in schools with more science resources. In contrast, principals seemingly addressed teacher capacity issues by envisioning and promoting the professional development and empowerment of teachers in schools with low socioeconomic status. The instructional management of principals was positively related to the enjoyment and interest of students in science, and those with high levels of such learning attitudes obtained high levels of science achievement. In contrast, the promotion of the professional development of teachers was negatively related to science enjoyment and interest of students.

A Systematic Narrative Review of Servant Leadership Through the Lens of Gender and Race-Ethnicity

Individuals’ social identities implicitly inform the experience and enactment of servant leadership. Whereas the broad field of leadership is wrestling with the dynamics of power and identity, a gap exists in the servant leadership field. This systematic narrative review examines gender and race-ethnicity in the servant leadership literature from 2009 to 2021. Specifically, we explore how gender and race-ethnicity influence the perceptions and experiences of servant leadership for both followers and leaders. Our review yielded 89 relevant studies across journal articles and dissertations, from which we offer several broad conclusions. Our findings on race-ethnicity as both resource and constraint for leaders of color converge with what has been seen within leadership studies in general; research on the demographic factors of race and ethnicity lags in comparison to the broad field of literature; and more novel theoretical frameworks for the study of gender and race-ethnicity are emerging, particularly in dissertations. Our study contributes a more detailed picture of how demographic characteristics are treated in the servant leadership literature, thus expanding our current understanding of servant leadership phenomena.

Do Servant Teachers Practice What They Preach? A Case of Academic Servant Leadership in A Faith-Based School in Indonesia

Servant Leadership has been considered as significant to improve the leadership of educational leaders including the one at schools. This research explores the academic leadership in a faith based Senior Highschool in Indonesia. The research involves a mix method of interview and questionnaire survey with the purpose of confirming the understanding and enactment of servant leadership by the teachers. This study was guided by the central question ‘To what extent the teachers understand Servant Leadership? To what extent the teachers have practiced Servant Leadership (SL)?’ for interviewing the teachers. The authors apply the Servant Leadership Behavior Scale as the theoretical foundation and statement items for 261 students. The collected data are then processed using qualitative data analysis which involves a reiterative process of data display, data condensation and conclusion drawing. The authors concluded that teachers understand Servant Leadership as ‘mengutamakan orang lain’ (prioritizing others), mendengarkan (listening), dan mau terlibat/mendampingi (being involved) and in they have been practicing SL as in line with the understanding. These understanding and practice have been confirmed by the findings from the questionnaire that 3 out of 6 dimensions of SLBS that have been understood and implemented well, specifically: Voluntary Subordination, Covenantal Relationship, and Transforming Influence.

School middle leaders as instructional leaders: building the knowledge base of instruction-oriented middle leadership

PurposeThis paper aims to explore developments over the past 25 years in the knowledge base on instruction-oriented middle leadership in schools. The authors document the trends in the literature since middle leadership began to attract scholarly interest in the late 1990s and explore the shifting structural and content patterns in the knowledge base.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a topographic methodology to analyse both structural elements and major results drawing from 147 peer-reviewed journal articles.FindingsThe authors draw on the review's outcomes to propose a model that frames a core set of middle leaders' instructional leadership practices. They also identify the personal, departmental, organizational and external influences shaping middle leadership practices and identify a lack of research conducted outside Anglo–American societies. This gap in the literature suggests the need for the increased study of middle leadership in different national settings and systems and how these influence the practice and enactment of middle leaders around instruction. There is also a need to employ a greater range of methodologies to understand middle leaders' instructional roles.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper lays a foundation for the future development of middle leadership for instruction and highlights signposts to guide future inquiry.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the middle leader knowledge base by focussing on their enactment of instructional leadership.

Shadowing methodology and the role of the Educational Leader

ABSTRACT In this paper we examine the role of the Educational Leader in early childhood education and its day-to-day pedagogical leadership enactment. The aim of the study was to gain a deeper understanding of, and insight into, the role of the Educational Leader in an Australian setting. We use shadowing as a research methodology, along with observation, contextual interviews and reflective conversations as data collection methods in this single case study. This enabled us to closely observe participant actions of early childhood educators and the situated leadership behaviours of the Educational Leader. Findings include discovering the interplay between the pre-school and the primary school with the glass doors situated between the two forming an ‘invisible barrier’. Additionally, the care and consideration shown by the Educational Leader created and supported the conditions for collaboration and collegiality among colleagues. We conclude that the use of the shadowing methodology in early childhood education and care contexts is a useful methodology, particularly for research involving small-scale studies.