Conclusion, Contributions, and Suggestions 6 127 Teachers were most often central members in a network. Being a central member meant that they influenced others’ knowledge and skills by providing advice to others about collaborative innovation practices. They thus performed a leadership role. In addition to teachers, coach-teachers were often central members. Coach-teachers are teachers that help their colleagues to practice collaborative innovation with the four leerKRACHT tools. Teachers experienced that coach-teachers were needed to prepare and provide structure in collaboration sessions and stimulate teachers to collaborate (in the horizontal working relation). Furthermore, they were needed to address school principals on their role in collaborative innovation and connect teachers and school principals (vertical relation) (Chapter 2). 6.1.3.3. Collaborative spirit in leading collaborative innovation Thirdly, we found that a collaborative spirit supports leading collaborative innovation with distributed leadership. School teams with higher degrees of distributed leadership had a stronger collaborative spirit to improve education together compared to school teams with lower degrees of distributed leadership (Chapter 5). This collaborative spirit has a few key elements. Firstly, it is a matter of interactions between team members unrelated to formal or perceived leadership roles. This element is based on the following findings. On the one hand, school teams with higher degrees of distributed leadership had Team player school principals. These school principals interacted with their teachers – for instance, developing the school vision together. Moreover, they provided professional space to teachers so that teachers can interact with each other and take leadership roles. On the other hand, we found that perceiving someone as a leader did not matter when asking someone for advice, and thus interacting, in school teams with higher distributed leadership. These team members ask for advice about collaborative innovation, irrespective of formal leadership roles. Perceiving someone as a leader did matter when asking advice in teams with lower distributed leadership. Secondly, the collaborative spirit relates to intrinsic motivation. Members of school teams with higher distributed leadership differed from members of school teams with lower distributed leadership in their motivation to improve education. Teams with higher distributed leadership were highly motivated to improve their education and their school culture further. They were not driven by an extrinsic motivation, such as the urgency to improve a low educational quality. Teams with lower distributed leadership were mainly motivated to achieve sufficient educational quality. These teams had received a negative judgment of their educational quality by the Dutch Inspectorate of Education.
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