Distributed Leadership

Over the first decade of the 21st century, a modest but expanding body of work has emerged on what is commonly referred to in the literature as distributed leadership. The idea has also garnered considerable attention from policymakers, practitioners, and philanthropists in several countries and international organizations such as OECD, though there is no shortage of scholarship on school leadership and management in particular and organizational leadership and management in general. Still, the appeal of a distributed perspective appears to lie in part in that it offered an alternative to dissatisfaction with the great person approach to theorizing about organizational leadership and management, what Gary Yukl terms the “heroics of leadership paradigm” (Gary Yukl, “An Evaluation of Conceptual Weaknesses in Transformational and Charismatic Leadership Theories,” The Leadership Quarterly 10.2 [1999]: 285–305, p. 292). At least two ideas are central in writing about and research on distributed leadership. The first is an acknowledgement that leading and managing schools (and other organizations) involve multiple individuals, not just the school principal, including other formally designated leaders and individuals without such designations (e.g., teachers with no formal leadership position, parents, or even students who influenced an organization’s core work). In this way, a distributed perspective called for attention to both the formal and informal organization and how these two aspects of the organization worked in interaction with one another (James P. Spillane, Distributed Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006); Spillane and Diamond 2007, cited under Empirical Work on Distributed Leadership in Primary and Elementary School). Still, writings about distributed leadership often focus rather narrowly on the array of individuals that take responsibility for leadership and management work. The second idea is that the practice of leading and managing needs to be a central concern in research and development work on organizational leadership (Gronn 2000 and Spillane, et al. 2001, both cited under Theoretical and Conceptual Work). Rather than narrowly conceptualizing practice in terms of the actions or behaviors of an individual leader, from a distributed perspective practice is framed in terms of the interactions among organizational members as enabled and constrained by aspects of their situation. Studying the practice of leading and managing necessitates examining how the practice is stretched over school leaders, followers, and aspects of their situation. Thus, careful attention to interactions, rather than fixating exclusively on the actions of an individual leader, is necessary when taking a distributed perspective to school leadership and management.