Distributed leadership and micropolitics

Abstract

The theories used to describe and explain educational leadership are subject to change as interests and priorities unfold. In the 21st century, distributed leadership has become increasingly fashionable as scholars, policy-makers and practitioners regard it as an appropriate way to lead and manage schools and other educational organisations. This model provides the potential for principals to share leadership, partly to reduce workloads and partly to empower and develop teachers. In the version of the model promulgated in the global north, distribution is seen as ‘emergent’, with principals nurturing a climate to encourage leadership initiatives that may arise anywhere in the organisation. A contrasting version, sometimes encouraged or mandated in centralised systems, is allocative distribution where tasks are given to teachers, notably senior and middle leaders, in a process often indistinguishable from delegation (Bush and Ng, 2019). Micropolitics, a model pioneered by Eric Hoyle (1982) in the 1980s, is based on the assumption that conflict is endemic in organisations, as participants seek to promote and defend their interests, both personal and professional. Interest groups arise, perhaps linked to subjects, and compete for supremacy within schools. Conflicts are usually resolved through the exercise of power and it is principals, of course, who usually have the most power in schools. This model has become much less prominent in the new millennium, perhaps because it is seen as unduly cynical in portraying staff in professional organisations as pursuing conflict rather than consensus. Mor Hodaya and Izhak Berkovich provide a rare contribution to distributed leadership theory by aligning it with micropolitics. They claim that distributed leadership largely adopts an apolitical outlook, with a limited focus on how it links with power. The authors adopted a multiple case-study design, with four Israeli secondary schools. Because they are generally larger and more complex than primary schools, they are ‘ideal sites’ for exploring distributed leadership. Their data indicate ‘imperfect’ distribution, noting that principals exerted control through ‘veto power’. They claim that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for example, tends to promote distributed leadership. They conclude that policy makers wishing to promote distributed leadership should foster context-specific supportive conditions. Joan Andres Traver-Marti and her colleagues also focus on distributed leadership, in the context of Spanish inclusive schools. They define inclusive schools as those which are committed to ensuring that all students benefit from equal access to quality education. They also adopted a multiple case-study design, with four public infant and primary schools in four different regions of Spain. Through their participatory action research projects, they claim that the four management teams followed inclusive and democratic leadership practices, similar to what is understood as distributed leadership. They conclude that management teams are key to developing inclusive education, by fostering collaboration, shared vision and collective decision-making. A central question in understanding distributed leadership is ‘to whom is leadership distributed’, although this also assumes a deliberate rather than an inadvertent process. In many settings, particularly where distribution may be characterised as allocative, it is senior leadership figures who are the Editorial