112 might be the low educational quality. This provides an extrinsic motivation to improve education rather than an intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, the school principal in these teacher teams with lower distributed leadership may have felt the urge – because of the lower educational quality – to tighten the reins in terms of leadership. In addition, Kessels (2018) mentions a paradoxical leadership dynamic that might also help to interpret these results in the teams with lower distributed leadership. He reviewed four studies on school principals’ leadership and found that school principals respond to teachers’ attitude. He argues that if teachers mainly focus on their own classroom, are reluctant in taking initiatives, and avoid collaboration, teacher teams seem like an organizational administrative unit. This impedes a shared values orientation and professional social exchange and provokes more directive leadership of school principals. Subsequently, this might result in a restriction of teachers’ professional spaces and this then influences how teachers behave. One might wonder about the causality; namely, whether the collaborative spirit within teacher teams results in higher distributed leadership, or vice versa. However, following the distributed leadership perspective, we interpret the link between distributed leadership practices and its sociocultural context as a reciprocal process; leadership and context influence each other. The notion of ‘mutual influence’ is introduced by the interpersonal theory, acknowledging that persons mutually influence each other’s behavior (Horowitz & Strack, 2010; Veldman et al., 2017). Furthermore, many cultural researchers stress this mutual influence, by showing how sociocultural contexts affect leadership practices (e.g., Pea, 1993; Rogoff, 1990), and how these contexts are also transformed through leadership practices, at the same time (Spillane & Sherer, 2004). An example is the role of culture: This constitutes leadership practices and is created and potentially transformed by leadership practices (Giddens, 1979). The more specific Kessels’ (2018) paradoxical leadership dynamic implies that school principals’ leadership is provoked by teachers’ attitude and vice versa, as mentioned. Or and Berkovich (2021) found the mutual influence between school principals’ leadership and contextual characteristics such as school culture as well. They argue that school principals should reflect on how their practices fit cultural characteristics. We contribute by stating that school principals and also teachers should be aware of their attitude, how they influence others, and that they are influenced by others, and that they are able to proactively create new practices by changing their own attitude. We did not find evidence that teaching experience, personal contact, team size and team gender composition, working on lesson practices, educational sector, and several reasons to implement the program were linked to distributed leadership practices. The
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