Distributed leadership
"[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.
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] 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.
This part of the framework foregrounds leadership activities and all individuals who contribute, avoiding the tendency to focus solely on designated leaders.
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.
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.
It originated with the work of anthropologist Edwin Hutchins in the 1990s with his studies of navigation on a naval aircraft carrier.
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.
[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.
[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.
[22] Taking an analytical perspective is to understand leadership activities as a product of the interactions amongst leaders, followers, and the situation.
