Describing and measuring leadership by applying a social network perspective 4 69 4.1. Introduction The studying of solely the role of formal leaders in innovation, which has long been the focus (Hansen & Pihl-Thingvad, 2019; Liu &Werblow, 2019; Molines et al., 2020; Ospina, 2017; Sun & Xia, 2018), is an approach losing currency (Angelle, 2010; Ospina, 2017). In most theoretical frameworks, leadership has commonly been defined as individuals exerting influence over others to structure activities and relationships, knowledge, and skills (Daniëls et al., 2019; Yukl, 2002). Distributed leadership theory postulates that multiple team members can be considered leaders, thus both school principals and teachers, as they are able to influence the motivation, knowledge, or practices of other team members (Daniëls et al., 2019; Harris & Spillane, 2008; Spillane, 2005). A growing body of literature acknowledges a crucial role of distributed leadership for successful innovations in schools (Brown et al., 2020; Daniëls et al., 2019; Fullan, 2016; Hulpia et al., 2009; Jambo & Hongde, 2020; Law et al., 2010; Meijer, 2014; Ricard et al., 2017; Sullivan et al., 2012; Tian et al., 2016; Tummers & Knies, 2013; Vogel & Masal, 2015). This is in line with the international call for a more social, collaborative, and networked approach to school innovations (Liou et al., 2020). Sinnema et al. (2020) state that sharing responsibilities brings teachers the opportunity to benefit from the capacities of multiple members. Furthermore, teachers can develop a fuller appreciation of the interdependence between and support structures among each other (Azorín et al., 2020) and as a result, this can have powerful impact on arriving at more innovative and democratic solutions (Sinnema et al., 2020; Snoek et al., 2019). However, despite the growing number of effect studies, limited knowledge exists on how to describe and how to measure the multi-faceted concept of distributed leadership (D’Innocenzo et al., 2016; Daniëls et al., 2019; Harris, 2013; Liu & Werblow, 2019; Tian et al., 2016). The aim of our study is to theoretically describe and empirically explore how to measure distributed leadership within school teams from a social network perspective. Previous studies that proposed to measure distributed leadership with such a perspective were explorative and based on small samples but argue the relevance of applying the social network perspective well (e.g., Brown et al., 2020; Liou et al., 2014). Distributed leadership is a social networked process of distributing leadership practices and responsibilities (Sinnema et al., 2020), and the strength of the social network perspective is that it includes all these social relations in a network of team members (Cullen-Lester & Yammarino, 2016; D’Innocenzo et al., 2016; Sinnema et al., 2020). By combining distributed leadership theory with a social network perspective, we follow a growing number of scholars that call for contributing to “the lack of research into bringing to the forefront both emergent paradigms” (Naumov et al., 2020, p. 9). To this purpose, we study Dutch school teams that
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