Principal leadership and organizational change in schools: a cross-cultural perspective

Principal leadership and organizational change in schools: a cross-cultural perspective

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 27, Issue 3

Change and development has been a prevalent issue for schools and educational systems. High public value associated with education makes it a critical strategic public service for governments. Improving and sustaining student outcomes in the face of various forces of change originating from demographic, technological, political, and economic developments have been pushing schools and education systems to undertake frequent change interventions. Depending on the characteristics of individual educational systems change interventions exhibit different natures (pace, linearity, and scale) and origins (top-down vs bottom-up). The revival of school effectiveness and school improvement movements, particularly after the emergence of world-wide PISA movements made change a top agenda for school and education systems. As a result, change and development efforts in individual schools and broader school systems have been conceived as the primary managerial practice to accomplish improved student outcomes while principal leadership has been has been indicated as a key ingredient of these change interventions in bringing positive outcomes in educational change.

Despite the frequent change interventions, several scholars indicated limited effectiveness of change interventions in bringing out intended outcomes both in the broader field of organization science (e.g. Beer and Nohria, 2000; Clegg and Walsh, 2004; Dahl, 2011; Jansson, 2013; Porras and Robertson, 1992) and specific field of education (e.g. Cheng and Walker, 2008; Hallinger, 2010; Harris, 2011; Levin, 2010). For example, Cuban (2013) argued frequent structural, curricular, and cultural changes results in minimal improvement in teaching practices. More importantly educational change interventions are criticized for failing to bring system-wide sustained change (Fullan, 2006; Payne, 2008). School change is suggested to target improved student outcomes rather than focussing on the change process itself. On the other hand, financial limitations, conceptual ambiguity, negative attitudes toward change, negative history of change, excessive fragmentation, work overload, and lack of participative practices causes limited success in educational change interventions (Fullan, 2000; Hargreaves, 2004; Walker and Qian, 2012).

We believe the intensified of dissatisfaction about educational change theory and practice is a source of dynamism, plurality, and theoretical richness rather than indicator of stagnation in educational change. The discussions over theory and practice of educational change extended our conceptual understanding of change and contributed to our skills of practicing change in organizations. However, in our perspective three perspectives still demand further consideration. First, the fact that most of the criticism focus on the way we conceptualize change (planned, top-down, fragmented, and discontinuous) we need a reversed conceptualization in educational change as well, which will potentially complement the conceptual gap in our understanding of change. Second, considering conceptual developments in educational leadership we need reconceptualization on the role of leadership in educational change inventions. Particularly the developments in distributed leadership necessitate extended elaboration on the role of leadership in educational change. Third, considering cultural and structural differences between educational systems, there is a need for wider intercultural understanding of leadership role in educational change. Particularly there is a need for more elaborations on system-wide structural characteristics of educational systems (centralized vs decentralized systems) in change practices. Following we briefly disclose each of these points.

First of all, the dominant change perspective, which is characterized as planned, top-down, fragmented, and discontinuous is basically incomplete in explaining the reality of change in organization (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Langley et al., 2013; Orlikowski, 1996; Weick and Quinn, 1999). Similar observation was reported by several educational change scholars as well (e.g. Gallucci, 2008; Honig, 2008; Louis Seashore, 2008; Stein and Coburn, 2008). Change scholars in the broader field of organization science suggested continuous change approach for a completed and holistic perspective of change (Jansson, 2013; Langley et al., 2013; Lok and De Rond, 2013; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011). Like in the broader field of organization science, educational change scholars indicated the need for an alternative perspective on the way we conceptualize change. Louis Seashore (2008) argued that change occur in the form of small-scale increments and mostly in the form of adjustments to stimuli by organizational members. In that regard, change is emergent and unfolds on a continuous basis rather than being a product of planned and top-down effort. Fullan (2006) criticized this individualized and incremental approach to change for being inherently slow and failing to bring sustained improvements at scale. However, distributed leadership, extensive participative management practices, knowledge sharing, and increased interdependencies among system units eliminate the risk of losing such individualized, informal, and small-scale changes go in between without recognition. Particularly collective capacity and distributed leadership are instrumental in increasing the capacity of the organization in retaining small scale and incremental changes and make them part of ordinary organizational practice. Several scholars suggested several different managerial practices and tools compatible with collective capacity and distributed leadership, which potentially enable continuous change in educational organizations. Tolerance of ambiguities and the ability to respond to emergent local needs (Gallucci, 2008), building networks and practice communities (Stein and Coburn, 2008), and sustaining collective learning (Boyce, 2003) are some of these managerial practices. Although continuous change perspective have been investigated broadly in the larger field of organization science, it has not received similar scholarly interest from educational change researchers. However, several educational change scholars articulated similar statements on the limitations of the planned, large scale, and discontinuous change and articulated the evidence for continuous change in educational organizations (Bain et al., 2011; Gilstrap, 2007; Louis Seashore, 2008; Gallucci, 2008; Honig, 2008). These scholars suggest promising developments toward continuous change in the field of educational change.

Second, this special issue aims to extend the discussions on principal leadership and educational change. Several scholars indicated the role of leadership in organizational conditions (Hattie, 2009; Hofman and Hofman 2011; Jacobson, 2011; Leithwood and Mascall, 2008). Jacobson (2011) described the salient leadership practices that improve student achievement: establishing direction, building capacity among members of the school community, and restructuring the school as needed. Leithwood (2007) described variation in student learning explained by leadership which, although only 5-7 percent, is about one quarter of the total impact of school-level influences. Despite the existence of various studies on different types of leadership and educational change, educational change theory needs further development to bring deep educational reform. Fullan (2006) indicated the need for a new change leadership which goes beyond the increasing student achievement and aiming sustainability in organizations. Fullan (2006) defended that accomplishing large-scale change depends on the mastery of leadership in linking sustainability with systems thinking. Inter-organizational interaction enables lateral capacity building and when lateral capacity building is cumulated around different school leaders, actual change happens.

In this issue two papers elaborated on role of leadership in educational change. Lindberg (2014) pointed provided an important insight on the ineffectiveness of educational change interventions. According to Lindberg, short-term perspective of principals direct their focus on immediate actions (i.e. teaching) at the expense of long-term school development efforts. As a result, principals fall into a contradictory state because they can improve teaching if only invest enough in school development practices. According to Lindberg, further incentives to prioritize school development efforts as well. According to Jones and Harris (2014) leadership is essential for accomplishing sustained change at scale out of “individualized, fragmented and incremental” change. The authors particularly suggested that distributed leadership has the capacity of accomplishing sustained school improvement at scale because of its potential in building strong collaborative teams, building collective capacity, facilitating knowledge sharing, delegating authority, and facilitating continuous learning in the organization. These outcomes of distributed leadership, enable every organizational member contribute to change process rather than limiting change interventions into a small group of change agency. According to Fullan (2006) leading on your own is not a meaningful contribution unless he/she fosters leadership development on the part of other organizational members. Hence, distributed leadership acts as a source of building collective capacity and capability to accomplish change. They rely on referent bases rather than role responsibilities. Collective capacity (collective talent and ability within the organization) facilitates collaborative learning, acquisition of new skills, relies on mutual support and motivated to undertake the challenging task of change. Distributed leadership disseminates knowledge about effective practice throughout the organization and makes such knowledge accessible to every member of the organization. This is believed to be another factor for commitment to change. Collective capacity and continuous learning contribute to continuous change. Distributed leadership is essentially concerned with generating and extending professional competencies, resources, motivation and expertise in the organization.

The third dimension of the theme of this special issue is related to intercultural understanding in educational change. Intercultural differences, another key element in change and development efforts, has been under investigated in educational change literature (Louis Seashore, 2006). Intercultural perspective in educational change is particularly important because of system variety. Although education systems dramatically differ across the world, scholars rely on similar theoretical frameworks in explaining change and practitioners adopt similar practices in implementing change. We may claim that educational change theories have been developed for decentralized educational systems. Such systems are typically developed for federal states in which policy makers enjoy extensive authority over the decision making and decision implementation. Webber et al. (2014) added massive international migration and economic interdependencies as the other causes of the similarization of the educational policies. Besides, due to the advances in information technology change practices in these decentralized system are disseminated and embraced in countries with totally different structural functional characteristics. Webber et al. (2014) warned that “schools are no longer immune to various forces of globalization as epochal and social changes, and suffer from endemic policy borrowing and their own crisis of effectiveness.” Disregarding structural and functional characteristics of the system in adoption of these theories and repeating similar change practices provides one explanation why there are differentiated outcomes on the relationship between leadership and change effectiveness.

Limited effectiveness of the dominant educational theory in centralized systems should not mean a call for restraining or compartmentalization educational change theory and practice into one systems. Rather, as stated by Chen and Ke (2014) experiences in different cultural settings should breed context sensitive management research to capture context features and understand context embedded logics. However, educational change and scholars need more informed convergence of theory and practice.

Keeping intercultural sensitivity in mind, Chen and Ke (2014) elaborated extensively on the role of different types of leadership on student achievement and highlighted the importance of social setting and social meanings in educational change practices. They argued that contextual sensitivity can be made possible by taking leadership and management as cultural constructs and practices. In that sense, their analysis on Chinese case showed that principal leadership in China experience unique contradictions and challenges, which have rarely been confronted by their Western counterparts. In a study of Western case, Sweden, Lindberg (2014) documented that, under total decentralization school principals are not able to resolve fundamental contradiction between short-term teaching functions and long-term school development functions.

Dr Kadir Beycioglu
Buca Faculty of Education, Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey

Associate Professor Yasar Kondakci
Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Education, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

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Further reading

Leithwood, K. and Jantzi, D. (2000), “The effects of transformational leadership on organizational conditions and student engagement”, Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 38 No. 2, pp. 112-129