Ben van der Hilst

352 leads to a relatively simple organization in which all other elements of the organization are designed to optimize the functioning of these teams. One of these elements, a very important one, is the conduct of the school leader. The team-centered leadership, a form of involved leadership required in the TAO, necessitates new competencies from the school leader. Important pillars in this model are the defined professional behavior of the teacher and the definition of the teacher functioning as a part of a collective. All elements of the TAO are presented in an organizer that the school leader can use to set up and maintain the TAO. Results The study provides an important tool for school leaders to simultaneously manage quality, agility and job satisfaction as well as filling a gap in the theory of school leadership; it accomplishes this by taking the organizational structure as a focus. The or- ganization model that has been introduced, the team-centered labor organization (TAO) assumes the comprehensive development of the student as a product definition rather than the organization of the educational process as a final product. This is an important paradigm change when compared to the dominant organizational structure. A second paradigm shift that the TAO implies is the shift from the fragmented responsibility of all teachers involved in each part of a student’s development to the collective responsibility of the education team for the entire student’s development. The education team has a sufficient mandate and skills to realize this responsibility. All parts of the organiza- tion are aimed at ensuring that the education teams function optimally. The behavior of the school leader is an important part of the work organization. The school leader designs, maintains and supports the TAO and acts unambiguously within this structure. The study identifies this type of leadership, referred to as team-centered leadership or involved leadership, as a third major paradigm shift; a shift from the dominant leadership paradigm that is rooted in the managerialism of the new public management. Other contributions to the theory are the distinction between teachers’ professional behavior type 1 and type 2 ; the distinction between educational program team and education team; the analysis of weak connections in the organizational structure as a cause of managerial weakness in schools; connecting the isolated teacher with the Taylorian division of labor in new public management; and the identification of schools as chaotic systems that can become adaptive through the organizational structure. The study makes a number of recommendations for schools, and for training programs for school leaders and teachers that aim to enable team-centered labor or- ganization to function properly. The study concludes with recommendations for further research into the or- ganizational model and the position of the school leader within it. An argument is made for knowledge-oriented participative research, in order to ensure that the developments in academic discourse on school leadership simultaneously furthers improvements in practice.