Understanding distributed leadership practices in and around teacher teams 5 113 lack of a link with teaching experience and personal contact seems to indicate that these individual characteristics matter less for distributed leadership than their collaborative spirit. The same holds for team size and team gender composition (Karriker et al., 2017; Mehra et al., 2006) and educational sector. With regard to working on lesson practices, all teacher teams seem to collaborate little. The lack of a link might be caused by the collaboration being focused on lessons, while the characteristics that did indicate a link seem to be more about collaboration beyond lessons, such as improving education and having a spirit of ‘we do it together’. 5.5.1. Future research and limitations We advocate the inclusionofmultiple sociocultural contexts in future research, as our findings confirm the relatedness of the different levels (Rogoff, 1990). Future research could further study how several contextual levels relate to each other and how their combination link to distributed leadership practices. Diving deeper into the relationship between a collaborative spirit and distributed leadership practices could help schools in achieving more of such collaborative and distributed practices. We were only able to gather data in one country, and we were not able to include the international level. However, according to Liu (2020), this level also plays a role in distributed leadership in schools since countries differ in cultures. In addition, wewould recommend that future research should preferably includemultiple teams fromone school, but we acknowledge this is labour-intensive for respondents to complete the questionnaires and for researchers to perform the social network analyses per teacher team.A limitation is that we worked with an existing dataset, and thus could examine the individual level background characteristics only. We could not include characteristics of individuals such as intrinsic motivations (Hirschler, 2013; Windmuller, 2012) and the engagement of teachers with their schools (Schaufeli, 2013). Based on our findings, we would expect these to be linked to distributed leadership practices, and therefore recommend that future studies include these. Another limitation is that because of a limited dataset in various distributions of men and women and educational sector (especially secondary education), we held back from drawing conclusions. Still, our study reveals interesting insights into the links between sociocultural context characteristics and distributed leadership practices. Lastly, since three teacher teams of the same vocational education organization were included, the scores on school level, thus school principals’ leadership and the school culture variable, weigh more. However, the links we found between the contextual characteristics and distributed leadership practices remain the same if we would ignore the three teams. An option would have been not to include two of the three teams but then we would have had less variation in our sample on the team and individual level.
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