The Emergence of Hybrid Role Conflict in Conflicting Settings: A Unique Challenge for School Leaders

Abstract

To what extent do divided cities characterized by geopolitical conflicts and a variety of contradictory expectations create a distinctive context and a unique professional conflict for individuals holding boundary-spanning roles? Data collected in a set of in-depth interviews conducted with school principals leading Arab schools located in East Jerusalem provide evidence for principals’ stress following the large and various number of role expectations they are expected to satisfy. The data testify to principals’ exposure to a hybrid role conflict—a unique conflict reflecting a mixture of incongruent expectations regarding a particular issue coming from both internal and external sources representing different sets of values. Moreover, it is evident that hybrid conflicts suggesting a clash between competing values and ideologies foster principals’ tendency to employ a radical coping strategy based on a cost–benefit minimal risk approach and to act deceitfully as means to diminish their stress. The study demonstrates the significance of contextual features that frame the scope for individuals’ professional behavior when serving in boundary-spanning roles and discusses some implications of hybrid conflicts for professional judgment and behavior.

Can Pedagogical Considerations Overcome Political Constraints? Principals’ Perceptions of Leading in a Divided Community

“…School leaders are often exposed to changing and unpredictable occurrences that they cannot ignore or contain, requiring them to make changes and adjust the activities and educational processes they had intended to initiate. These circumstances promote hybrid conflicts (Nir, 2011), exposing school leaders to lose-lose situations in terms of their abilities to make decisions that would potentially ease their stresses, while allowing them to initiate and implement educational processes in line with their professional discretion. Hybrid conflicts push educational leaders to the edge, while impelling them to adopt a distorted professional agenda.…”

“…This may especially hold true for educators who are constantly faced with the need to educate students and help them develop their own personal and national identities and moral sense. Arab school principals are caught in a double bind as a consequence of the different official agendas they are required to follow (Nir, 2011).…”