Diagnostic perspectives on the distribution of leadership in school organizations: an analysis on two key dimensions

Abstract

The study of school leadership has evolved as a relevant, meaningful and consistent area, when it comes to explaining improvements in school effectiveness. Instructional and transformational leadership, as well as leadership for learning approaches, have characterized key areas of a school director"s practice. However, given the nature of school organizations, whereby interaction rather than individual action plays a major role in building influential capacities, the perspective of distributed leadership has emerged as a distinctive feature. Hence, this work, of a descriptive-analytical nature, provides theoretical and operational foundations on how to approach distributed leadership for its diagnosis in schools. Two dimensions of a questionnaire from a larger study, administered to 1.518 directors and teachers of two incidental samples of one hundred elementary and high schools in Chile, are analyzed separately by exploratory factor analysis. As the main results of the study, the existence of a single factor that would narrow the gap between the current and desired perception of the leadership distribution is verified. Regarding distribution patterns, only three of the six scales that comprise it, would be unifactorial. As a conclusion, the first dimension is robust and constitutes a viable strategy for an initial diagnosis, considering the limitations of social desirability that both the construct and the instrument may have.