96 5.2.3.3. School context level linked to distributed leadership practices School level characteristics seem to be divided in terms of the school as an organization, the background characteristics of school principals, and the leadership role of school principals. With regard to the school as an organization, school culture was found to represent whether members are open to distributing leadership practices (März et al., 2018). School culture can be a stimulus for distributed leadership practices to become embedded if it includes all school members, and builds upon collaboration (Harris, 2014; Liu et al., 2018; Muijs & Harris, 2006; Tam, 2019). Liu et al. (2018) found that mutual respect, as an aspect of school culture, results in more distributed leadership practices. In addition, the reasons for schools to engage in innovation and collaboration processes might be linked to distributed leadership practices. One such reason might be the pressure to innovate in terms of educational practices (Makoelle, 2014; Scheerens & Demeuse, 2005). Lastly, several review studies indicate that the leadership role of school principals and their background characteristics are key to creating conditions for distributed leadership practices (Drewes et al., 2019; Jambo & Hongde, 2020; Liu et al., 2018; März et al., 2018; Tian et al., 2016). However, the ways in which school principals’ leadership foster distributed leadership practices is relatively understudied (Drewes et al., 2019; Mentink et al., 2021). 5.2.4. The current study: Multiple teams, multiple levels We investigated teacher teams in the Netherlands. In the Dutch educational system, strong school autonomy is combined with the monitoring of quality standards by the national government (Nusche et al., 2014; OECD, 2018). Our study is part of a larger research project in which a program was evaluated that is aimed at collaborative innovation; this means that teachers and school principals collaboratively approach innovation processes (Bekkers & Noordegraaf, 2016; Torfing, 2019). In an earlier study on how to measure distributed leadership practices in such collaborative innovation-oriented teacher teams,13 differences were found in distributed leadership practices between teams (De Jong et al., 2022). Within the current study, we use these differences between teacher teams to study the role of wider sociocultural contexts. We go beyond previous research, by using a combination of three contextual levels, namely, individual, team, and school contexts. This leads to the following main research question: How can differences in distributed 13 We continue to refer to these collaborative innovation-oriented teacher teams in this chapter as teacher teams.
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