ABSTRACT
Recent work suggests that viewing school leadership from a distributed perspective has the potential to provide new and useful insight into how management and leadership unfolds in the daily life of schools. Writing about school leadership and management from a distributed perspective has identified numerous individuals – both positional and informal leaders – in the school across whom the work of leadership and management can be distributed (Camburn et al., 2003; Heller & Firestone, 1995; Spillane, 2006). While there have been advances in articulating a distributed conceptual framework on school leadership (Gronn, 2000; Spillane, 2006), the empirical research base in this area is less developed. Most empirical work has involved small samples of schools and work on larger samples has tended to focus on the designed organization as reflected in formal leadership/management positions as distinct from informal leaders who might not appear on a formal organization chart.
