Educational Leadership Research Paper

1. Generic Leadership Versus Educational Leadership

Scientific research on school administration and educational leadership began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when researchers in the ‘theory movement’ began utilizing the techniques of the social sciences to examine these topics (Willower and Forsyth 1999). Although researchers recognized that schools and colleges were totally different from business and industrial organizations, little attention was given to differences among types of organizations in the early research. Instead, leadership and administration were treated as generic organizational issues for many years, with few questions asked about what might be distinctive about these functions or processes in educational settings. To the extent that a generic approach is considered sufficient, one only needs to look at the generic literature on leadership and administration in organizations. The main argument in this research paper, however, is that generic approaches, although valuable, are insufficient for comprehending effective leadership in educational organizations.

Many definitions of leadership exist, but most acknowledge that it involves the ability to influence others—often defined as the ability to get them to do what they otherwise would not do—coupled with the ability to get people to accept a mission or vision of the goals or purposes a group, a team, or organization should follow (Hoy and Miskel 1996, Leithwood and Duke 1999). To distinguish between leadership and management, some definitions emphasize that leadership involves bringing about change or innovation, while management involves maintaining the smooth operation of the existing organization. Research on leadership has evolved from early studies that focused on the traits or abilities of effective leaders, to recognition of the importance of the situation or context that leaders face. Thus, a ‘contingency’ approach asks what traits in what situations are important for effective leadership (Hoy and Miskel 1996).

1.1 The Importance Of Context

The organizational structure of typical schools and colleges involves a context in which teachers are solo practitioners doing discretionary, professional work. This workplace impedes direct supervision and fosters the autonomy of employees (Lortie 1975). This context thus reduces the effectiveness of a directive, ‘command and control’ style of leadership and seems conducive to a more collaborative approach. This raises the question of how leaders can best improve the effectiveness of schools and teachers. The early research on educational leadership emphasized strong, directive leadership by school administrators, but more recent research suggests that a more participatory and collective approach to leadership is needed, to obtain the consent of employees and to build a sense of ‘professional community’ in schools (Newmann and Wehlage 1995). Some of the contextual aspects of schools, such as the tension between their bureaucratic and professional features, create what Ogawa et al. (1999) call the ‘enduring dilemmas of school organization.’

How much teamwork and democracy are really needed in schools seems to be both a cultural and philosophical question. In the English-speaking democracies, cultural values press for a democratic approach, even if it is seldom fully achieved. In other societies, for example many Asian nations noted for high student achievement, schools are usually run in a more traditionalistic, ‘top-down’ manner. The Asian nations show that, in a cultural context supportive of student effort, traditional values, and the importance of learning, traditionally structured schools, utilizing top-down management and teaching, can be very successful. In more pluralistic Western societies—less supportive of effort, traditional values, and learning—effective schooling is more difficult to achieve. Firestone and Louis (1999) provide an interesting discussion and set of references on these themes.

To the extent that schools, wherever they are located, can be instructionally effective through some combination of high academic standards, strong teachers, and a milieu supportive of learning, they may not need to undertake school improvement efforts. But many, if not most schools lack these qualities and need systematic improvement efforts. Research has shown repeatedly that teachers in these more typical schools often lack the motivation and/or the skills or capacity to successfully implement new programs or teaching approaches (Fullan 1991). The need to enlist their involvement and effort in school improvement ventures creates a demand for educational leadership, i.e., leadership primarily focused on facilitating and improving the core function of educational organizations: teaching, and learning. The need for school improvement also calls for leaders adept at motivating and managing the change process in organizations.

1.2 Models Of Leadership

In a comprehensive review of the research literature on school leadership, Leithwood and Duke (1999) delineate six models of leadership as predominating in the articles published since 1988 in four leading English-language educational administration journals. Of the three most frequently mentioned models, ‘instructional leadership’ led with 13 mentions, followed by ‘transformational leadership’ (11 mentions), and ‘contingent/leadership styles’ (nine mentions). The other three leadership models uncovered were ‘moral leadership,’ ‘managerial leadership,’ and ‘participative leadership.’ Instructional leadership is close in meaning to the broader concept of ‘educational leadership’ explicated here. Transformational leadership involves leadership that inspires and heightens the commitments and capacities of organization members toward the attainment of organizational goals. In contrast, ‘transactional leadership’ involves the exchange of valued things between leaders and followers in a more extrinsic relationship that lacks the quality of a mutual pursuit of higher purposes.

Leithwood and Duke (1999, p. 54) state that the contingent/leadership styles approach focuses on ‘how leaders respond to the unique organizational circumstances or problems they face as a consequence, for example, of the nature and preferences of coworkers, conditions of work, and tasks to be undertaken.’ Moral leadership (see Hodgkinson 1991) focuses on ‘the values and ethics of the leader, so authority and influence are to be derived from defensible conceptions of what is right or good’ (Leithwood and Duke 1999, p. 50). Managerial leadership ‘focuses on the functions, tasks, or behaviors of the leaders’ ( p. 53) in the belief that competent performance of these functions will facilitate work within the organization. Participative leadership emphasizes the group’s decision-making processes and collective involvement. As argued earlier in this research paper, it represents the kind of leadership increasingly in demand in democratic societies.

1.3 Democratic Or Shared Leadership

Fearing that leaders tend to abuse their power—in education as elsewhere—critics call for more democratic, shared or collective governance arrangements (Chapman et al. 1995). Advocates of educational leadership, while recognizing the possibility of negative leadership, emphasize the importance of leadership for organizational improvement and extol the value of leaders capable of communicating an inspiring vision of a more dynamic and effective organization. However, whether educational leadership should be viewed, normatively or empirically, as the property of one or a few individuals or as a collective organizational property is an increasingly important question, both in research and practice.

Since the 1970s, scholars embracing critical theory and post-positivist orientations have mounted a sustained critique on mainstream approaches to social science, organizational theory, and leadership (Heck and Hallinger 1999). As Leithwood and Duke (1999, p. 63) note, three features of the theory movement in educational administration have come under attack: ‘a positivist orientation toward knowledge, a structural– functionalist conception of organizations, and a control-oriented, managerial view of leadership.’ Arguing that knowledge is actually ‘socially constructed,’ that hierarchical relationships in organizations reinforce unjust inequalities in society, and that a control orientation toward leadership and administration impedes reform and empowerment, critics such as Foster (1989) contend that educational leadership must focus on social justice and emancipation.

Along with concerns for democracy and justice, pressures for more shared or participative leadership also increasingly flow from demands for higher performance and better student achievement. The case for ‘high-involvement’ management for high-performance schools is well stated by Darling-Hammond (1996, pp. 146–7).

Efforts to invent nonbureaucratic twenty-first-century organizations tend to use incentives and structures that motivate through collaboration rather than coercion; build strong relationships rather than rely solely on rules for governing behavior; encourage quality by structuring work around whole products or services rather than disconnected piecework; and create information-rich environments that support widespread learning and self-assessment among workers rather than rely primarily on hierarchical design and supervision of work routines. Such organizations aim to stimulate greater thoughtfulness and creativity rather than focusing largely on enforcing compliance with predetermined procedures. Their success, then, depends on the creation of new opportunities for teacher and school learning, new modes of accountability, and new kinds of incentives for continual improvement and problem solving.

Research on school improvement efforts and, particularly, on the professional development of teachers to facilitate these efforts, shows how the theory and practice of educational leadership can move toward approaches that are more participatory and democratic. Smylie and Hart’s (1999) perceptive synthesis of research on school leadership and teacher learning and change illustrates this well. Building on work on human and social capital development, they show how teacher collaboration in improvement initiatives and teachers’ sense of membership in a professional community can be fostered through more participative and distributed forms of leadership. Smylie and Hart (1999, p. 428) contend that, rather than a hierarchical, bureaucratic style of leadership, ‘from social and human capital development perspectives, attention is drawn toward relational and interactional aspects of school leadership. These perspectives call for a broader conception of school leadership, one that shifts from a single person, role-oriented point of view to a view of leadership as an organizational property shared among administrators, teachers, and perhaps others’ (p. 428). This view ‘sees leadership as participative and inclusive, as infused throughout the social system of the school in ways that foster collective responsibility, mutual trust and obligations, and joint accountability’ (p. 436).

Smylie and Hart emphasize that school principals still have vital roles to play in this shared approach to leadership, for example, in creating opportunities for interaction, fostering social bonds, and establishing support systems. Further, they stress that efforts to move to this participative model always encounter resistance because they ‘challenge deeply entrenched patterns of isolation and autonomy that define teachers’ work’ ( p. 430). Leadership and improvement strategies for pulling teachers out of these deeply engrained norms and habits are the subject of extensive research and writing (Sykes 1999), some of which cautions against manipulating teachers against their will.

2. School Culture And Change

Firestone and Louis’ (1999) review of research on ‘schools as cultures’ emphasizes that the shared culture of isolation and autonomy among teachers in many schools frequently inhibits change and improvement efforts. Nevertheless, they argue that, within some limits, leaders can begin a process to change a school’s culture toward one more conducive to participation, professionalism, and improvement. This can be done, in part, through the effective use of ‘symbolic leadership,’ in which the leader uses symbolic language and ceremonies, highlights key values and shared meanings, and reinterprets events to renew or redirect the organization’s culture. A related strand of research, in the broad field of school improvement and organizational change literature (Louis et al. 1999), involves the growing interest in leadership approaches to foster ‘organizational learning’ in schools (Leithwood and Louis 1998). The well-known ‘continuous improvement’ and ‘total quality management’ approaches represent views of how organizational learning can be institutionalized in organizations.

Differences in national cultures associated with such core values as ‘equality versus inequality, collectivism versus individualism, masculinity versus femininity, and uncertainty avoidance versus tolerance for ambiguity’ are among the factors that affect leadership and the culture of schools (Firestone and Louis 1999, p. 302). At the same time, the increasing forces of globalization produce pressures and trends that tend to reduce national differences and ‘internationalize’ or standardize the character of education systems and educational administration (Chapman et al. 1999). For example, growing international pressures to honor diversity and end discrimination based on race, religion, gender, etc., are changing the culture of schools worldwide and opening the doors of school leadership to people from all backgrounds. Thus, effective educational leadership is likely increasingly to require more inclusive and collaborative approaches that foster collective responsibility and commitment, thereby promoting professional development and school improvement.

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