84 The presence of central members, as one key element of the combination of measures, deserves further attention. Identifying central members and whether those are formal or informal leaders is particularly interesting, since it shows how leadership is structured within school teams and helps to reflect whether the leadership is distributed in the way teachers and school principals would like to see it. The latter meaning that teachers and their school principal can talk together about how leadership is structured within their specific team and school and whether they want to change that structure. Furthermore, distributed leadership implies that there is a powerful relationship between vertical and horizontal leadership processes, and that formal leaders have to create cultural conditions and structural opportunities that enable informal leaders to lead and make changes (Harris, 2008). Harris (2008) stated that informal leadership practices are not yet reaching their full potential within schools. Our findings indicated that teachers are most often central members, and that school principals never performed this role on their own. Not only does this indicate a certain level of distributed leadership in schools that were part of this research, but also sounds promising for teachers’ professional development (Civís et al., 2019; Sinnema et al., 2020), job satisfaction (e.g., García Torres, 2019), and organizational commitment (e.g., Hulpia et al., 2009). Within the context of collaborative innovation, compared to the school principals, teachers seem to be more often considered by their own team members to ask for advice. Furthermore, we found that coach-teachers and teachers, as informal leaders, are often the central members together, including the school teams with less distributed leadership. Our findings underline the potential of using a social network perspective to study distributed leadership. 4.5.1. Future research The focus of the present study was to build upon previous studies on how to describe and measure distributed leadership. Follow-up research is needed to determine whether the within team interactions that we studied are indeed representative of distributed leadership as discussed in literature. Besides, additional research can further conceptually dissect the concept of distributed leadership. Furthermore, our study does not offer an explanation for the differences in distributed leadership between school teams nor identifies the possible impact of these differences on relevant outcome measures. Therefore, further research is needed to explore whether the differences between school teams can be explained by variables such as school culture, leadership patterns of school principals (De Jong et al., 2020), gender, and teaching experience. To further deepen
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