Making Sense of Distributed Leadership: Exploring the Multiple Usages of the Concept in the Field

Abstract

Background: The term distributed leadership is now widely used among scholars and practitioners in the field of educational leadership. Major actors in the nonprofit sector promote and financially support the development of distributed leadership. Unfortunately, there is confusion and ambiguity about what distributed leadership means, and there is no strong link between distributed leadership and two primary goals of the educational leadership field: school improvement and leadership development. Purpose: The author inventories usages of distributed leadership and exposes some of the key fault lines between these meanings and the implicit disagreements that underlie them. The author's objective in this exercise is to catalyze discussions about how to keep research around distributed leadership both theoretically anchored and connected to problems of practice central to the field. Findings: There are four common usages of the term distributed leadership , which include the original descriptive theoretical lens and three prescriptions for how sharing leadership in schools can improve practice. Each usage has its strengths and weaknesses, though two of the prescriptive usages are actually contradicted by empirical research. Conclusions: While not dismissing any particular definition, the author encourages those who use the descriptive definition to focus more on making connections to school improvement and leadership development. The author also encourages those who use the prescriptive definitions to use theoretically and empirically grounded research frames and offers suggestions about how to link research on distributed leadership to the practical concerns of the field.

Distributed Leadership in a Low-Carbon City Agenda

“…Findings from this study provided empirical evidence that a distributed approach in leadership is able to influence the outcome of low-carbon city agenda. The findings concurred with studies that suggest the potentially positive effects of distributed leadership on goal achievement (e.g., [98][99][100][101]) and also on improved organizational outcomes (e.g., [72,[102][103][104][105]). …”

Distributed Leadership an Instrument for School Improvement: The Study of Public Senior High Schools in Ghana

“…These findings are consistent with that of Harris (2004), Timperley (2005) and Mayrowetz (2008) who argued that teachers can become overstressed through distributed leadership. They were however certain that shared decision-making which is a tenet of distributed leadership accrue to better teaching practice which in turn benefit the school as a whole, especially if teachers and organisational goals are not well aligned.…”

The role of the associate dean in UK universities: distributed leadership in action?

“…While research on distributed leadership is well established in the literature on schools (see, for example , Gronn 2008;Lumby 2013;Mayrowetz 2008;Spillane et al 2007;Torrance 2013;Woods et al 2004), with Lumby (2013, p. 581) referring to it as 'the theory of choice for many', there has been surprisingly little research on this topic in the higher education sector (Bryman 2007b). This is the case even though, as previously argued, the notion of 'distributing leadership' in universities has become increasingly popular (Bolden et al 2009;Floyd and Fung 2017).…”