114 5.5.2. Implications for educational practice Our study aimed to identify aspects of the sociocultural context on individual, team, and school level that are critical in constituting distributed leadership practices in teacher teams. Based on our findings, we see several implications for educational practice. First, the results of our study encourage teachers to collaborate (more), talk about improving education, dare to ask preferably all other team members for advice, and believe in the strength of team members’ expertise. Second, higher distributed leadership is found in teacher teams where school principals enact leadership practices to promote improving education becoming a joint process. This insight into which role to take is relevant for school principals who want to distribute leadership and build a collaborative spirit within their teacher teams. Being aware of the influence you have on others and processes such as mutual influence with teams, helps in breaking down attitudes and practices that are not suitable for distributing leadership. Finally, teacher educators have a key role in teaching teachers to exert a productive role regarding distributing leadership practices within their team. Teacher educators need to train teachers to be able to collaborate and ask advice from and provide advice to others, to believe in their own expertise and the expertise of others, and to have a collaborative spirit. They need to stimulate ‘enacted’ professionalism by way of which educational professionals try to reshape their work on the basis of an intrinsic motivation to do so. The educational context – schools and teams – should facilitate this. 5.6. Conclusion Among the available empirical research, most studies treat distributed leadership as an independent variable when investigating its effect on individuals and schools (García Torres, 2019; Harris, 2008; Hulsbos et al., 2016; Tian et al., 2016). We studied how distributed leadership practices are embedded in sociocultural contexts, based on a rich dataset with a mixed-methods design. Our study further develops the argument that studying the sociocultural context of distributed leadership practices with multiple related context levels helps to generate knowledge for the (practical) understanding of distributed leadership practices. In sum, our findings provide insights for academia and practice that show that distributed leadership works well with team members sharing a collaborative spirit to improve education, backed by intrinsic motivations to do so. That’s the (collaborative) spirit.
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