Leadership practices of school principals in collaborative innovation 3 63 (e.g., establishing frameworks). This concept of school principals remaining at a distance is identified in the review of Antonakis andAtwater (2002). They regard leaders’ distance as an element of leadership influence and state that leaders may appear to be at distance physically, socially or regarding infrequent contact. The Facilitators indeed seem to act at a distance, both by remaining physically remote and by making contact infrequently. According to Klein (2017), mixed results have been reported regarding the effects of leader distance on the innovation process (such as on trust and exchange of knowledge). This study adds an early understanding of school principals’ reasons for being distant (e.g., time constraints, different prioritization). Furthermore, based on the fact that half of our sample of school principals enact these distant practices, we emphasize the importance of the effectiveness of this pattern being addressed by future studies. Overall, the presented patterns of leadership practices describe howschool principals view their roles in vertical collaborative innovation. School principals who enact Key player and Team player leadership practices have frequent interactions with teachers, and a vertical collaborative relationship is consequently present. In contrast, Facilitators do not (wish to) build up a collaborative relationship with their teachers, instead remaining at a distance. School principals described by either of the three (sub)patterns seem to consciously reflect on who is responsible for collaborative innovation in schools, but to act in different manners regarding for instance the sharing of responsibilities with teachers and their own involvement. Lastly, we found that most primary school principals enact ‘our’leadership practices, whilst most vocational education school principals enact ‘their’ leadership practices. The size of the schools they lead might present a tentative explanation. In the Netherlands, primary schools often have (far) fewer students and thus fewer organizational layers and fewer subject teachers than in vocational education. It might be the case that the smaller a school the more involved a school principal can be regarding collaborative innovation. 3.5.3. Future research and limitations We studied how 22 school principals enact their leadership in collaborative innovation and identified a set of leadership practices and patterns. Obviously, future studies will need to address whether these leadership practices and patterns are also found in larger samples of school principals, and whether these findings apply in schools using other collaborative innovation-based interventions than the specific program researched here. Moreover, it would be interesting to follow the grounded theory approach even further and actively search for counterexamples of these leadership practices, a research strategy which is advised by Corbin and Strauss (2008). Nonetheless, we consider this study
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