Describing and measuring leadership by applying a social network perspective 4 85 our understanding of distributed leadership, future qualitative research could expand our initial findings. Specifically, it could help to understand the quality or content of the advice, why members (do not) ask a certain team member for advice and whether this depends on how the team member is perceived, and how the team members are interacting. Additionally, future research could study the sustainability of distributed leadership, as we would expect that distributed leadership increases within teams when they continue working with a collaborative innovation approach for an extended period of time. Additionally, further research needs to examine the generalizability of our approach to other contexts and countries. The results of the present study have limited generalizability, since we studied the rather specific context of Dutch school teams that all have implemented a specific program aimed at collaborative innovation. However, the strength of our study is that it builds upon previous studies by adding valuable insights into the potential of measuring distributed leadership in schools with three social network measures and we had a robust (in response rate) sample of 14 school teams. We suggest that future research include more than one school team per school. This would provide possibilities for testing team differences within schools in levels of distributed leadership. 4.5.2. Practical suggestion A practical application of our study is to interpret distributed leadership measures of schools together with the teachers and school principals of that particular school. In this way, schools will be encouraged to reflect on (the level of distributed) leadership within their teams and as a result improve their collaborative approach to innovation. This forms a response to the recent international call for a more social, collaborative, and networked approach to school innovations (Liou et al., 2020). 4.6. Conclusion Despite the growing number of studies on the effects of distributed leadership, limited knowledge exists on how to describe and how to measure the multi-faceted concept of distributed leadership. Thus far, studies on distributed leadership are largely dominated by aggregation approaches, such as studies that used self-perception questionnaires that ask about distributed leadership on team level, rather than a social network perspective, in which distributed leadership is measured by each individual relation in a network.
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