Describing and measuring leadership by applying a social network perspective 4 83 Figure 4.1 Sociogram of school team C (n = 12) Note. Black circles represent central members, those having the largest number of incoming ties. The person on the upper left has no connections with the other teammembers. Thick lines represent reciprocal relations, the ‘regular’ (or dashed due to the design program) lines are non-reciprocal relationships. Figure 4.2 Sociogram of school team H (n = 10) Note. Black circles represent central members, those having the largest number of incoming ties. 4.5. Discussion The present study contributes to the growing body of empirical research on describing and measuring distributed leadership. Previous research utilized solely aggregated data or studied one or two of the core aspects of distributed leadership. We firstly theoretically dissected distributed leadership and afterwards measured all three core aspects of distributed leadership that we dissected with a combination of social network measures: Density for the collective aspect, centrality for the dynamic aspect, and reciprocity for the relational aspect. This combination of social network measures has an innovative potential for the search of how to measure distributed leadership. The three measures helped to us identify differences in distributed leadership between school teams. Based on the observed correlations between the different network measures, the explored differences between school teams, and the sociograms, we propose that the measures each can help to describe a different aspect of distributed leadership. Studying their combination can help to more comprehensively capture and describe the multi-faceted concept of distributed leadership. Specifically, the correlations between the network measures indicated a relation, which is important for forming a combination of measures, but also showed no strong correlations, indicating each aspect’s separate contribution to the informativeness of the combination of measures. Furthermore, the sociograms show the added value of the relational aspect in addition to the collective and dynamic aspect and the strength of interpreting the combination of these three measures to describe and measure distributed leadership in school teams.
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