Collaborative spirit: Understanding distributed leadership practices in and around teacher teams

Abstract

While the effects of distributed leadership are widely studied, how to understand this practice in sociocultural contexts is relatively unknown. Mostly only one contextual level – such as the school level – is studied. We included individual, team, and school levels, and investigated differences in distributed leadership among 14 collaborative innovation-oriented teacher teams (130–168 teachers and their principals). Using a mixed-method design, we found that distributed leadership is associated with experiencing no threshold when it comes to asking advice, as well as with teachers looking beyond their classrooms. This occurs when teachers and school principals generate a ‘collaborative spirit’ to improve education.