De 'beliefs' van schoolleiders bij gespreid leiderschap
Authors:   , Mentink Robertus Willibrord 
Published: May 2023

School leaders wishing to advance distributed leadership often end up in what Kessels (2021) calls the leadership paradox. The school leader openly states their wish to stimulate distributed leadership, but displays behaviour that hinders, rather than helps this development. This behaviour comes from underlying tension that school leaders experience with distributed leadership. To “solve” these tensions, school leaders often take leadership into their own hands. As a result of this ‘backlash’ of a more traditional leadership paradigm in which the leader is seen as the ‘hero’ (Liljenberg & Andersson, 2019; Spillane, 2006), school leaders consciously or unconsciously restrict the autonomous space needed for teacher leadership. There are indications in both practice and research that the ‘beliefs’ of school leaders play a role in the tensions which they experience in the transition to distributed leadership (Marchial & Wouters, 2018; Kessels, 2021; Louws et al., 2020; Van der Hilst, 2019). Beliefs are conceptual representations in which knowledge of objects, people, and experiences, as well as their characteristic relationships are saved (Hermans et al., 2008).

This dissertation offers insights into how the school leader can become more self-aware, and through this growth in self-awareness may come to a deeper understanding of their own beliefs. Self-awareness can lead to taking a ‘different’ view, to being able to see ‘more’ and finally to more conscious action that brings the ‘desire’ and the ‘doing’ closer together, ensuring that there is less of a leadership paradox. In other words: self-awareness leads to more freedom (of choice) in leadership (Bieri, 2006; Bieri, 2012).

In this study distributed leadership is defined as a dynamic process in which teachers temporarily acquire and assign leadership within a factual and perceived autonomous space. Teachers influence their colleagues, the organization, and their surroundings from this position. With distributed leadership, the school leader promotes the autonomous space and the informal, individual and collective leadership of teachers. This definition is in line with the agency movement of distributed leadership which emphasizes that leadership arises organically and voluntarily (DeRue & Ashford, 2010; Gronn, 2002; Harris, 2008; Spillane, 2006; Spillane et al., 2004).

School leaders in this research were only partially aware of their own beliefs and the role they played when making choices in their leadership. It can be cautiously stated that school leaders with beliefs mainly in the dynamic belief system and space-creating beliefs, are less likely to experience tension with distributed leadership. These school leaders will be quicker to create the autonomous space for leadership of teachers than school leaders whose beliefs mostly fall in the governing belief system with primarily space-consuming beliefs.

This dissertation clearly shows that the school leader can help the autonomous space for leadership of teachers and that they consciously, but mostly unconsciously hinder it.