A Review of Empirical Research on Distributed Leadership at Schools

Abstract

Recently distributed leadership is on the agenda of educational researchers. Considering the remarkable leap in the number of studies conducted for the past ten years, this review focused on the empirical studies in educational institutions carried out between 2005 and 2015, with a cross-cultural perspective. Keeping the conceptual models offered in the literature in mind, the reviewers attempted to shed lights on the reflections of distributed leadership on the ground. Throughout this narrative review, 43 empirical studies conducted in schools from 18 countries were scrutinized through content analysis. Answers were sought for some critical questions on practicing of distributed leadership by presenting the emerging themes and concepts. Furthermore, this article presented practices of distributed leadership at schools on various countries in the lights of the empirical findings of the studies the literature. Additionally, in the final section of the current review, the conceptualization of distributed leadership with empirical outline was discussed, and some recommendations were offered towards sharing school objectives, values in a frame of collective vision for contributing to learning at schools.