110 5.5. Discussion This study responded to prior calls to direct more attention to the study of the sociocultural context of distributed leadership practices (Liu, 2020; Liu et al., 2018; Or & Berkovich, 2021). Using a mixed-methods design, we studied characteristics of three contextual levels, in order to answer the research question: How can differences in distributed leadership between collaborative innovation-oriented teacher teams be understood from multiple sociocultural context levels? We reached a better understanding of the sociocultural contexts of distributed leadership by finding links with four characteristics, which we will summarize from the perspective of teams with higher distributed leadership practices. Firstly, teachers in teacher teams with higher distributed leadership practices clearly asked each other for advice on schoolwide organizing improvement processes, instead of mainly or only focusing on their own classrooms. Secondly, team members of these teams approach each other for advice irrespective of perceiving someone as a leader. Thirdly, the school principals of these teams participate more in the innovation processes. Fourthly, these teams started the program for reasons other than low educational quality. These four characteristics indicate a collaborative spirit to improve education together. This collaborative spirit manifests itself in teachers talking about improving educational standards at their school, and thus (daring to) look beyond their own classroom. These teams have an intrinsic motivation to improve their education collaboratively. This is in contrast with teams with lower distributed leadership practices and a lack or lower degree of collaborative spirit, which have an extrinsic motivation, namely the improvement of the quality of their education, but it seems that they do not collaborate as much to solve it. We thus conclude that teacher teams with higher distributed leadership practices have a stronger collaborative spirit to improve education together. As stated in our theoretical framework, previous research mainly studied one contextual level in relation to distributed leadership and thus cannot address relatedness between context levels. We studied a combination of three contextual levels, namely, individual, team, and school contexts, and continue by interpreting these – together – in the remainder of this discussion paragraph. A collaborative spirit in teacher teams with higher distributed leadership practices is linked to the wider debate about ‘professionalism in transition’, which is visible in organizational literature (e.g., Andersen et al., 2018; Noordegraaf, 2007, 2011, 2015; Wu et al., 2017). We especially recognize how Hoyle (1975) and Windmuller (2012) distinguish ‘extended’ from ‘restricted’ professionals. They describe ‘extended’ professionals as teachers who are involved in professional activities outside the classroom, and collaboratively improve education and their own professional development by
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