Distributed leadership

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Distributed leadership is a conceptual and analytical approach to understanding how

the work of leadership takes place among the people and in context of a complex
organization. Though developed and primarily used in education research, it has since
been applied to other domains, including business and even tourism.[1] Rather than
focus on characteristics of the individual leader or features of the situation, distributed
leadership foregrounds how actors engage in tasks that are "stretched"
or distributed across the organization. With theoretical foundations in activity
theory and distributed cognition, understanding leadership from a distributed
perspective means seeing leadership activities as a situated and social process at the
intersection of leaders, followers, and the situation.

Contents

• 1Background and origins

• 2Key concepts
o 2.1Leader Plus
o 2.2Practice
o 2.3Situation
• 3Foundational theories
• 4Usage of the term
• 5Notes
• 6General references
• 7External links

Background and origins[edit]

Distributed leadership emerged in the early 2000s from sociological, cognitive,
psychological, and anthropological theories, most importantly distributed
cognition and activity theory, though also influenced by Wenger's communities of
practice. It was conceived as a theoretical and analytical framework for studying school
leadership, one that would explicitly focus attention on how leadership was enacted in
schools, as an activity stretched across the "social and situational contexts."[2]
Leadership research up through the late 1990s focused on the specific traits, functions,
or effects of individual leaders. Much of the work done in educational research focused
exclusively on the principal and centered around defining the heroics of
individuals.[3] Descriptions were written of what was being done but not how, which
limited transferability across contexts. From this research it was unclear how leaders
responded to the complex environment in schools. Though some research on
leadership has continued to focus on the role or function of the designated leader, such
as instructional leadership or transformational leadership, there has also be a significant
shift to understanding leadership as a shared effort by more than one person. The latter
constructs look more broadly at various roles that provide forms of leadership
throughout the school, including teacher leadership, democratic leadership, shared
leadership, or collaborative leadership. Distributed leadership draws on these multi-
agent perspectives to describe how actors work to establish the conditions for improving
teaching and learning in schools. Distributed leadership is not an activity, rather a
procedure[4]

Key concepts[edit]
Leadership is defined as any "activities tied to the core work of the organization that are
designed by organizational members to influence the motivation, knowledge, affect, or
practices of other organizational members."[5] Thus a leader is anyone who engages in
these activities based on tasks, not position. As this definition implies, there is within an
organization a group of people who are influenced by these leadership activities: these
are the followers. Importantly, the role of a leader or follower is dynamic, and a person
might be a follower in one situation but not in another. Additionally, followers are not
passive recipients of these influences and followers may influence the leaders as well.
Leader Plus[edit]
The Leader Plus aspect posits leadership activity as a whole is stretched, or distributed,
across many people. Leadership is often enacted with those not in official leadership
positions, thus distributed leadership examines enactments of leadership activity rather
than roles. The configurations of leadership activity might include collaborated,
collective, or coordinated distribution.[6] Collaborated distribution is where two or more
leaders co-perform the leadership activity in the same place and time. In collective
distribution, the performance of leadership actions is separate but the actions are
interdependent. Coordinated distribution exists where the leadership activities are
performed in a particular sequence. Leadership activities are dynamic and situated, thus
these three categories do not correspond with particular types of activities or duties.
This part of the framework foregrounds leadership activities and all individuals who
contribute, avoiding the tendency to focus solely on designated leaders.
Practice[edit]
Practice is the product of interactions amongst leaders, followers, the situation over
time. This is a key link to distributed cognition, where thinking and understanding is a
process constituted of interactions with other people, tools, and routines, rather than
independently. Research from a distributed perspective often takes a task-oriented
approach[7][8] as a way to break down practice into manageable units of analysis.
Understanding how tasks are carried out and which are deemed important by leaders
and followers gives a window into practice.
This is a diagram to understand how leadership practice is stretched across leaders, followers, the situation,
and time.[9]

Situation[edit]
The situation comprises a complex web of material and social aspects of the
environment, such as history, culture, physical environmental features, and policy
environment, as well as more local aspects such as task complexity, organizational
structure, or staff stability. The key here is to identify and focus on the "aspects of the
situation that enable and constrain leadership practice but also captur[e] how they
shape that practice."[10] Whereas Contingency Theory describes the situation as merely
the context within which individuals act,[11] a distributed perspective looks to the situation
as constitutive, in the sense that it both influences and is influenced by the actions of
the people in it.
Two aspects of the situation that are often foregrounded in a distributed perspective are
tools and routines. Tools are objects designed with a purpose toward enabling some
action. Perhaps the most obvious example of a tool is a hammer. In organizations,
however, tools might be a rubric for assessing teaching or an attendance checklist.
They are not just accessories or incidentals; they both enable and constrain practice.
Tools help focus the users attention but can also obscure other elements. The
attendance taker might check off all those students present and think the task is
complete but fail to notice a student that is present but not on the list. In this way, the
tool is constitutive of the task, not just an accessory. A routine is a regular sequence or
pattern of actions that happen in an organization. This may or may not align with the
tools. For example, with a rubric for assessing teaching, the associated routine might be
when and how an instructional leader observes a class, such as instructional rounds.
Tools, routines, and other aspects of the situation might be locally designed, received,
or inherited.[12]
Importantly, tools and routines take a portion of the cognitive load required to complete
a task (see Distributed Cognition). In the example of the rubric for assessing teaching,
the principal doing the observations will be prompted for what to pay attention to and the
routine will improve a consistency to the observation practice. Thus the enactment of
leaderships in this situation is distributed across the principal, the teacher being
observed, and the routine.
Foundational theories[edit]
Distributed cognition sits at the intersection of psychology, sociology, and cognitive
science. It is essentially the theory that knowledge and the thinking with that knowledge
are stretched across the tools, situation, other people, and context. It originated with the
work of anthropologist Edwin Hutchins in the 1990s with his studies of navigation on a
naval aircraft carrier.[13] His work on understanding naturally situated cognition led to the
conclusion that cognition is socially distributed. Rather than looking for knowledge
structures within an individual, his work showed that cognitive activity, or knowing what
to do, was a situated process, influenced by other people, tools, and the situation.
Leadership is often studied as something that is done or acted out by an individual.
Social or shared leadership approaches often still see leadership as actions done by
individuals, just done in cooperation with others. Taking a distributed perspective, in
contrast, draws on the theory of distributed cognition to understand leadership is an
emergent property of the system. In this way, it sits in between those who see
leadership is a result of individual agency and those who see it as an outcome of the
situation.
Activity Theory is a broad social sciences approach to understanding human behavior
as contextualized in a situation. This situated perspective expands the unit of analysis to
the collective rather than individual and studies the relation between actions. Although
this approach is aimed at understanding the individual, the unit of analysis is the
broader system in which that individual participates. Engestrom identifies three
generations of activity theory and associated researcher: first generation, a model
focused on the individual (subject-object-mediating artifact) by Lev Vygotsky (1978);
second generation, expansion of the model to include collective action, by Alexei
Leont'ev (1981); and third generation, toward a networked understanding of interactive
activity systems, proposed by Engestrom himself (1987).[14] Another Activity Theory
scholar, Barbara Rogoff expands this work in two ways: first, foregrounding of the
individual must be done without losing sight of the interdependence of the system; and
second, there are three different levels of resolution (interpersonal, cultural/community,
and institutional/cultural planes) are needed to understand the different levels
activity.[15] A distributed perspective on leadership takes this networked and multi-level
approach to give "context of action" and "maintain... the tension between agency and
distribution.[16]
Additionally, Spillane and Gronn both draw on an application of activity theory in the
field of leadership research that grew out of Mintzberg’s studies of work-activity,
observing managers through structured observations to document what they actually
do.[17] While innovative and exciting at the time, the nature of this documentation was
ultimately deemed shallow as it did not differentiate between what was managerial and
non-managerial work, there were still unanswered questions about how management
was enacted, and it did not explain leadership effectiveness.
Understanding leadership from a distributed perspective means looking for leadership
activity as situated and social process, drawing on both distributed cognition and activity
theory.
Usage of the term[edit]
"Distributed leadership" entered the leadership and organizational theory discourse and
clearly appealed to various scholars, policy makers, administrators, and practitioners as
they have used it to frame, describe, and promote their work.[18] Some use it as a recipe
for effective leadership or improving schools; others use it to prescribe optimal
leadership or organizational structure.[19] The most common alternative usage is
equating distributed leadership with more than one designated leader, ideas such as
shared, democratic, or collaborative leadership. Studies along these lines often look at
the distribution of leadership roles.[20] Interest in these alternative organizational
structures reflect the increased demands on leaders in schools and changes in the
demands on educational organizations, and the term "distributed leadership" gets used
to represent this.[21] Some worry that this overlap in usage results in a watering down of
ideas or rebranding of old ideas in new terms.
A distinction that helps unravel the mixed usage is to distinguish between distributed
leadership as a conceptual or analytical framework versus distributed leadership as a
normative or practical framework.[22] Taking an analytical perspective is to understand
leadership activities as a product of the interactions amongst leaders, followers, and the
situation. This reflects the roots of the framework in distributed cognition and activity
theory. A practical or normative approach is concerned with optimizing the distribution of
leadership so as to improve organizations. In this case, research is focused on the
effects of certain configurations of leadership roles or activities. While the use of
Distributed Leadership as a term will continue to evolve as scholarship on the topic
continues to develop, this distinction is important in maintaining common epistemologies
for researchers, policy makers, administrators, and practitioners.