124 6.1.2.2. School principals’ leadership in collaborative innovation Chapter 3 describes our study on how school principals lead collaborative innovation. We addressed the research question: How do school principals enact leadership practices in leading collaborative innovation? Twenty-two school principals were interviewed twice. Transcripts were coded for leadership practices. The results indicated 11 leadership practices: Bottom-up, Involvement, Facilitation, Top-down, Motivation, Vision focus, Progress, Role model, Student focus, Transparency, and Connect. The school principals enacted these 11 practices in different ways, wherein we identified three leadership patterns: Team player, Key player, Facilitator. Team player school principals promote innovation for the joint process of teachers and school principals (often mentioning leadership practices such as Transparency and Involvement). Key player school principals see innovation as a collaborative process that is directed by school principals (Involvement and Top down). Facilitator school principals leave the collaborative innovation process to the teachers and exert control from a distance (Top down and Progress). We studied how these leadership patterns link to distributed leadership in Chapter 5. 6.1.2.3. Describing and measuring distributed leadership Chapter 4 addressed the research question: How can distributed leadership in school teams be described and measured by applying a social network perspective? We used a social network perspective since this perspective focuses on interactions between people. This is useful to study distributed leadership, as leadership practices are the result of interactions (Azorín et al., 2020; Freeman, 2004; Liou & Daly, 2020; Wasserman & Faust, 1994). A social network questionnaire was completed by 14 school teams. Based on a literature search, we described distributed leadership with three core aspects: Collective, Dynamic, and Relational. Collective means that leadership is a fluid co-performance process executed by multiple team members. Dynamic means that leadership can be claimed by those with the required expertise for the challenge at hand. Relational means that leadership revolves less around personal leadership acts and more around interactions. We found a coherent combination of three social network measures (density, reciprocity, and indegree centralization) that measure the three core aspects. Applying these measures showed differences in higher and lower degrees of distributed leadership between school teams. Teams with higher distributed leadership included teachers who had many relationships with their colleagues, and who sought advice from each other (measure of distributed leadership). Teams with lower distributed leadership included teachers with fewer relationships with their colleagues. In these
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