Excerpt below from pages 5 and 6 of  Timperley, H. & Robertson, J. [2011] Establishing Platforms for Leadership and Learning.  In Robertson, J & Timperley, H. [eds] [2011] Leadership and Learning. Los Angeles: Sage.

Patterns of leadership distribution

Another alternative to the heroic leader came with the work of Camburn et al. (2003),

Gronn (2003) and Spillane et al. (2004). Their collective empirical work confirmed

that leadership involves activities and interactions that are distributed across multiple

people and situations. This work had its origins in the ideas of shared leadership

(Etzioni, 1965) and distributed cognition which shows how material and

social artefacts aid in the distribution of understandings across situations (Cole

and Engeström, 1993). This work shifted the focus from the ‘what’ of leadership

concerned with people, structures, functions, routines and roles, to ‘how leadership

gets done through the ordinary, everyday practices involved in leadership

routines and functions’ (Spillane, 2006: 5). Who leads and who follows is dictated

by the task, and not necessarily by the hierarchical positioning of any individual

(Copland, 2003).

 

In line with this rather non-heroic view of leadership, Spillane defines leadership

in the following way: ‘Leadership refers to activities tied to the core work of the

organization that are designed by organizational members to influence the motivation,

affect, or practices of other organizational members or that are understood

by organizational members as intended to influence their motivation, knowledge,

affect or practices’ (Spillane, 2006: 11–12). While the main premises of this definition

(core work, influence, practices) appear to be widely accepted, inevitably

differences in perspectives have arisen. Spillane and colleagues have been concerned

about developing analytical and conceptual frameworks for studying this

influence process through a distributed lens. Others have transformed the leadership

descriptor to the adjectival form of ‘distributed leadership’. This latter group

have advocated that greater distribution of leadership is something to which educational

organizations should aspire if they are to meet the challenges of the

twenty-first century education (for example, Harris, 2008).

 

Something on which most researchers taking a distributed leadership perspective

agree is the potential benefits of utilizing expertise across and within organizations

through the co-construction of knowledge (Harris, 2008). Effective distribution of

leadership creates more opportunities for professionals to learn. The increased

opportunities, coupled with the focus of distributed leadership on the core work

of the organization, create strong links between leadership and learning. Thus

many of the chapters in this book implicitly, if not explicitly, take a distributed

perspective on leadership.

 

While most researchers have welcomed the shift to studying the ‘how’ of leadership

practices with its focus on learning rather than analysing styles or tasks,

nagging doubts have surfaced about whether distributing leadership per se will

actually be what makes the difference to some of our enduring educational problems.

Harris (2008), for example, explains that it is not the distribution of leadership

that determines effectiveness, but rather how it is distributed. Timperley

(2005) showed that greater distribution may lead to greater distribution of incompetence.

Robinson (2009) argues that to tackle the kinds of endemic achievement

problems evident in many countries, more focus is needed on the educational

content of the leadership process.

Last modified: Sunday, 11 November 2012, 7:42 PM