The possible misfit of Csikszentmihalyi’s dimensions of flow in the contemporary roles of school leaders

Abstract

In many jurisdictions school leaders are being placed under increased accountability and stress, which then affects their ability to address the real issue of education À improving students' learning. Flow Theory, developed by the HungarianÀAmerican psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, has a high degree of relevance to the issue of the way modern school leaders carry out their roles. A purposive sample of school leaders (N = 8) was interviewed about their Flow experiences, in both in-school and out-of-school situations. The nine dimensions of Flow (Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi, 1999) were used as a conceptual guide in the e-interviews. Each of the school leaders gave powerful descriptions of their memorable out-of-school deep-Flow experiences, but their in-school experiences of Flow appeared to have far less impact. The data analysis showed that with this sample of school leaders only four of Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi's nine dimensions of Flow were identifiable in their in-school experiences. The misfit of Csikszentmihalyi's dimensions of Flow is important, and needs re-interrogation in future research. Importantly, the moral dimension of the school leaders' job was identified by the respondents as the most important facilitator of Flow in both public and private schools, and this may provide the key to improved school leader resilience and motivation.

Organizational play: within and beyond managing

“…All 12 studies described themes or concepts that were either explicitly associated with play or which I interpreted as shedding light on organizational play. In addition to the obvious concept of play, these themes and concepts included fun (Dougherty and Takacs, 2004;Fleming, 2005;Plester, 2009;Hunter et al, 2010;King Kauanui et al, 2010), humor and jokes (Grugulis, 2002), shared laughter (Kangasharju and Nikko, 2009), flow (King Kauanui et al, 2010;MacNeill and Cavanagh, 2013), leisure activities (Guerrier and Adib, 2003), game-play (Lee and Lin, 2011), and fantasy and role play (MacIntosh and Beech, 2011). Although the emphases and findings of the studies varied, three central themes emerged from the synthesis, including: play as fun, pros and cons of organizational play, and management of play.…”

“…The same concepts were also presented in the findings, which may have resulted from carefully defining the research themes or adopting certain presuppositions. The effect of selecting a certain key concept to study was most evident in the research of MacNeill and Cavanagh (2013). The study was designed to examine flow, which directed the conduct and the interpretations.…”

Shared flow in teams: team vibration as emergent property, metaphor and surrogate measure

“…The choice of that property was a critical decision because it had to incorporate the greatest amount of known characteristics of flow under a phrasing that acted as a metaphor for groups of people in flow. In studies of flow, metaphors are sometimes used to describe outstanding situations involving groups, such as "being in the zone", "being totally involved", "feeling like everything clicks" or "being totally focused" (Pels et al, 2018;MacNeil and Cavanagh, 2013;Martin and Jackson, 2008;Sawyer, 2006). Metaphors allow researchers to talk indirectly about flow with team members (so that they are not contaminated with a priori concepts during the interviews) and, if properly crafted, a metaphor also promotes more efficient communications.…”

“…This reveals an intricate conceptual and methodological issue on how to measure flow in collaborative contexts. While the use of "I" or "We" as the ideal perspective seems unresolved at this moment, inductive-based studies are a powerful approach to compare emerging dimensions vis-à-vis the often criticized original dimensions of flow (MacNeil and Cavanagh, 2013;Swann et al, 2012) in search of particularities of flow in teams and flow in individuals; moreover, instead of explicitly mentioning flow or its original dimensions in interviews, the measurer may want to address particular manifestations of flow that can be perceived and communicated more efficiently between the measurer and team members in conversations. We thus decided to implement the two ideas, i.e., we used an inductive method and measured a specific manifestation of flow (the emergent property of team vibration) along with the use of a collective perspective ("We") to address its attributes.…”

“…This means that we search for the occurrence of SFT with no a priori clues on what to look at in individuals and their teams. Inductively based research is indeed helpful to make flow theory evolve (MacNeil and Cavanagh, 2013;Swann et al, 2012).…”