Leadership and organisational performance: from research to prescription?

How much does leadership matter?

Leadership has long been seen as a key factor in organisational effectiveness, but interest in educational leadership has increased over recent decades. This is due to a number of factors, often related to political changes to the education system, such as the growth of school based management in many countries over the past two decades, which has meant more influence for the school and therefore a greater role for the school manager, as powers and responsibilities have been devolved from local or national levels to the school. This has inevitably led to a growth in the importance of the headteacher and his/her individual role, and therefore to a greater interest in leadership as a key factor in school effectiveness and improvement, a statement that appeared to be corroborated by research in school effectiveness (Teddlie & Reynolds, 2000). An interest in transforming the public sector by learning from the business world contributed to this interest, as leadership was seen as one of the key elements that made private companies more effective than the public sector was perceived to be (Murphy et al, 2006) An interest in learning from the private sector, where leadership has long been seen as an important element in business performance, was therefore a contributing factor in the blossoming of leadership in education.

This interest in leadership among policy makers and researchers is backed by a great deal of rhetoric about the importance of leadership in schools. Successive British government leaders (and attendant initiatives such as LIG) have stressed the importance of school leadership, Britain’s former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, for example, stating that ‘As new headteachers you are the critical agents for change and higher standards school by school. There is literally no more important job in Britain today than yours’ (Blair, 1999). Similarly, the English inspection agency OFSTED has claimed that ‘‘changing the headteacher has been found to be the most successful means of taking a failing school out of special measures’. This political rhetoric is echoed in other countries. US president Bush, for example, declared that ‘if you've got a good principal, an innovative, smart, capable person, who is motivated and dedicated and who believes every child can learn, you'll find excellence in that particular school’ (Bush, 2003). This political rhetoric has been matched by an increased investment in leadership development, with moves towards required certification and participation in leadership development and/or induction programmes for heads and principals in an ever larger number of countries, such as the UK, the US, Austria, Hong Kong and some of the German states, and the setting up of programmes both within higher education and through private and state agencies charged engaged in leadership development. The most ambitious of these is probably the National College for School Leadership in England, set up in 2001 by the government to provide and coordinate leadership development, once again pointing to the importance attached to school leadership by the government, but also to a belief that leadership can be learned at least to some extent and that leadership development is the vehicle to do this. Again, certification in other countries would seem to suggest this belief is widely shared, and it is common at present for greater attention to be paid to leadership development than to selection procedures. 

Obviously, this expenditure and emphasis beg the question of whether school leadership really is such a decisive factor in school performance. Research would certainly suggest that it is a factor that can impact on outcomes. The work most often cited to this effect is Hallinger and Heck’s (1998) review suggesting a link between leadership and school effectiveness, albeit one that is mediated by having a shared vision and goals. In most cases, outcomes have, as is common (though not necessarily sufficient) in school effectiveness research, been defined as student learning outcomes, and more specifically as test results. Attempts have been made to connect leadership (usually defined as headteacher leadership) with outcomes, usually using a regression (or multilevel) model where different variables are regressed on pupil achievement. Other studies have likewise found leadership to be a key characteristic of effectiveness, Brookover (1979), in one of the earlier school effectiveness studies for example reporting that principals of effective schools were strong leaders, while other researchers in school effectiveness have found relationships between school effectiveness outcomes (usually at the pupil level) and factors such as principals developing a clear shared mission, and developing a focus on learning and teaching in the school. (Teddlie & Stringfield, 1993, Levine & Lezotte, 1995), and strong purposeful leadership by the headteacher (Mortimore et al, 1988; Sammons et al, 1995). Cheng (2002) found modest positive correlations between principal leadership and student attitudes towards school.
 
However, when we examine these studies more closely it is clear that most leadership variables are only modestly to weakly related to outcomes (e.g. D’Agostino, 2000; Hallinger & Heck, 1998; Van de Grift & Houtveen, 1998), and in some studies, no relationships were found at all (see Creemers 1993; Leitner, 1994). A meta-analysis covering a wide range of variables relating to student outcomes found that leadership had an average effect size of .52, which is higher than the average found for all educational interventions studies (.4) (some of which had virtually no impact at all), but significantly lower than factors such as Direct Instruction, feedback to students or cognitive strategy training (Hattie, 2005). This is not surprising, in view of the fact that one would not expect leadership to impact directly on outcomes. Proximity models of effectiveness would predict that leadership was too distal from students’ experiences to have a direct impact. This does not, however, mean that leadership is not an important variable. Rather, as suggested in, for example, the dynamic model of school effectiveness (Creemers & Kyriakides, 2007), we would expect effective leadership to be a factor that helps create the conditions under which teachers can be optimally effective, which in turn would result in higher levels of pupil performance.  This is indeed what a number of studies that have looked at more subtle ways of measuring the indirect impact of leadership have found. Both D’Agostino (2000) and Teddlie & Stringfield (1993), for example, report that leadership of the prinicipal was the key factor in helping create a strong shared mission and vision in the school, which in turn was related to teacher effectiveness, a finding confirmed in Hallinger & Heck’s (1998) review. Leithwood & Jantzi (1999) likewise found no direct effect of transformational leadership on student outcomes, but report an effect on school conditions. In their analysis Leithwood & Riehl (2003) reviewed quantitative research studies published in refereed academic journals which fulfilled methodological standards and published or publishable multiple case studies or systematic single case studies. The authors state that student characteristics have the strongest effects on student achievement (including intellectual ability, motivation, and socio-economic status. Then classroom characteristics matter (including teachers’ pedagogical techniques/active teaching strategies, and e.g. staff development acitivies). School leadership explains three to five percent of the variation of student achievement, but about one quarter of the variation explained by school factors in total. “Leadership effects are primarily indirect, and they appear primarily to work through the organizational variable of school mission or goals and through variables related to classroom curriculum and instruction. While quantitative estimates of effects are not always available, leadership variables seem to explain an important proportion of the school-related variance in student achievement.” (p. 13). Similarly, Leithwood et al (2007) report that School leadership is second only to classroom teaching as an influence on pupil learning. Leadership has significant effects on the quality of school organisation and on pupil learning (p. 1).

As D’agostino (2000) points out, it would appear that effective schools are good at accumulating strong human resources by fostering cohesion and morale within the school, and that the principal plays a key role in achieving his. A systematic review of eight studies conducted by the EPPI leadership review group in the UK (but drawing on research from a range of countries) on the impact of leadership on student outcomes likewise concluded that leadership can have an effect on student outcomes, albeit an indirect one. Key mediating factors found in these studies were the work of teachers, the organisation of the school and relations with parents (Bell et al, 2003). The evidence from the school improvement literature likewise highlights that effective leaders exercise an indirect influence on schools’ capacity to improve and upon the achievement of students, though this influence does not necessarily derive from senior managers, but can also at least partly lie in strengths of middle level leaders and teachers (Harris, 2004). Whilst the quality of teaching most strongly influences levels of pupil motivation and achievement, it has been demonstrated that the quality of leadership matters in determining the motivation of teachers and the quality of teaching in the classroom (Fullan, 2001; Sergiovanni, 1999). 

A particularly useful way of classifying models of educational leadership in this sense is provided by Hallinger (2008, p.17). He identifies four main types of causal models that underlie studies of educational leadership, the Direct Effects model, the Direct Effects with Antecedents' model, the Mediated Effects model, the Mediated Effects with Antecedents model and Reciprocal Effects model (see figure 1)

Figure 1: Models of causality
Model A1: Direct Effects 

Educational Outcomes

Principal Leadership

Model  A2: Direct Effects with Antecedents

Educational Outcomes

Antecedent Variables

Principal Leadership

Model B1: Mediated Effects

Educational Outcomes

Intervening Variables

Principal Leadership

Model B2: Mediated Effects with Antecedent Effects

Antecedent Variables

Educational Outcomes

Intervening Variables

Principal Leadership

Model C: Reciprocal Effects

Educational Outcomes

Intervening Variables

Principal Leadership

Hallinger (2008) claims that empirical data increasingly support the reciprocal effects model, where educational outcomes and school environment are equally strong determinants of principal leadership behaviours as principal leadership behaviours themselves are of educational outcomes. In other words, the leader does not simply shape the organisational culture and environment leading to enhanced outcomes, as is often assumed. Rather, the leader her/himself is influenced and shaped by the environment s/he finds herself in, a view obviously supported by earlier contingency theories (Fiedler, 1967). Hallinger (2008)reviewed doctoral dissertations using the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale, and found that reciprocal and mediated models were rarely used, with the majority of studies employing direct effects models, notwithstanding their clear theoretical shortcomings. 

Overall, then, it can be said that the view that leadership matters, as espoused by policymakers in many countries, is supported by the literature, though to a far lesser extent than one might imagine from some of the rhetoric. The impact is indirect, and modest rather than strong. Context is an important factor here, however, in that the influence of leadership at the school level is clearly stronger where school autonomy is greater. The Netherlands is a good example of this, as in that country the impact of leadership in most studies has increased from non-significant to modest as policy changes have rendered the influence of the head greater (van de Grift & Houtveen, 1999). Reciprocal effects are likely, and need to be built into models of leadership. 

What types of leadership affect educational outcomes?

As well as looking at the overall impact of leadership, it is clear that there are a number of ‘given’ views on what good leadership in schools consists of. The leadership literature tends to be quite prescriptive in nature, and factors such as transformational rather than transactional leadership, instructional rather than administrative leadership and leadership rather than management have all been posited as key elements of organisational effectiveness. Two factors strike one about this categorisation: one is the persistent use of dualities which posit one side of the coin as good and the other as bad, and the other is the way authors in the field quickly jump from limited research evidence to prescription. 

Transformational Leadership

An example of this is the perceived disjunction between transformational and transactional leadership. Transformational leadership has gone through a number of iterations in terms of its definition, but is usually described as leadership that transform individuals and organisations through an appeal to values and long-term goals. In this way, it manages to reach followers and tap into their intrinsic motivation (Burns, 1978). Transformational leadership is usually juxtaposed to transactional leadership, which is seen as mainly concerned with relationships of exchange, where, for example, financial rewards from managers are exchanged for extra employee effort. Transformational leadership is engaged with hearts and minds, and it is therefore not surprising that this conception has proved popular in education, where a strong moral purpose and commitment among both school staff and managers, relative job security and low and government determined pay levels will tend to favour the effectiveness of transformational over more transactional forms of leadership in fostering lasting change (Lumby, 1999, Van Esch et al, 2000). The distinction between transactional and transformational leadership is, while often quite starkly drawn in the literature, less clear-cut in actual management situations. All leaders will make use of transactional strategies to a certain extent, though the opposite is not necessarily the case (Harris & Chapman, 2002). In this respect the distinction resembles that between management and leadership, which have likewise been juxtaposed in theory but are often coterminous in practice. However, the prescriptive distinction remains strong in the mind of educators and indeed those who train school leaders, with transformational leadership habitually seen as ‘good’ and transactional as ‘bad’. Muijs et al, for example, (2006) report that respondents in further education typically were most likely to describe their own leadership as transformational, and the leadership of their line managers as transactional.

Transformational leadership, according to its proponents, is likely to lead to longer term change and more genuine organisational reform by raising followers’ levels of consciousness about the importance of the goals they are pursuing as an organisation, getting followers to transcend their own self-interest, and moving them to address higher level needs (Bass, 1985). Transformational leadership is seen as better able to cope with complex situations and was, along with instructional leadership (focus on teaching and learning) found to be a characteristic of effective leaders in Hallinger & Heck's (1998) review. There is some evidence in the literature that transformational leadership has positive organisational impacts. Leithwood & Jantzi (1999) reported on a number of studies in which transformational leadership predicted organisational conditions, such as shared goals and purposes, school structure, and social networks, which in turn affected student outcomes, in particular those relating to belonging to school, though the relationship is not as strong as sometimes assumed. Transformational leadership from the headteacher has not proved itself to be the panacea of school improvement that some expected it to be (Harris & Chapman, 2002; Muijs et al, 2004). It has become increasingly apparent that there are a number of problems associated with transformational leadership as a means to organisational improvement, which are closely related to the fact that leadership in this conception is usually located in the individual leader, mainly the principal, who charismatically inspires followers, through modelling, communication and stimulation (Bass, 1985). The first constraint arises from the problem that while leadership behaviours can be developed through CPD activities to a certain extent, the charismatic elements in the traditional definitions of transformational leadership are hard to engender if not present in the personality of the leader, leading to a limited pool of applicants who are capable of leading organisations in this fashion. 

Furthermore, even charismatic and strong transformational personalities will fail where organisational fit is lacking (Vroom & Jago, 1988). Contingency models clearly point to the fact that leadership does not necessarily transfer across situations, and the failure of programmes such as the ‘Super Head’ scheme in England give further valence to the contingency view that puts into question the universal applicability of transformational leadership. The question of fit between leader and organisational culture is a complex one. In traditional narratives around transformational leadership, the prevailing view is one of the leader moulding and changing organisational culture (e.g. Kotter, 1998). However, in many case research suggests that organisational culture is equally likely to itself change and mould leadership (Dimmock & Walker, 2002). Organisational structures too may constrain the extent to which leaders can be truly transformational, as can be seen in Higher Education, where the increased external accountability measures and enforced competition have, according to Prichard (2000) led to an increase in distrust and separation between management and staff. 

Another issue is that the often disruptive nature of transformational leadership can in some cases lead to strong resistance from staff that can itself impede change and improvement efforts (Mitchell & Tucker, 1992). In particular, research in the US has shown that strong transformational leaders sometimes provoke passive resistance whereby staff wait for the leader to move on. This is especially prevalent where rapid management turnover is built into the system (Beachum, 2004).

Where transformational leaders are successful, another problem emerges. Where leadership resides in the individual, difficulties arise when this person leaves the organisation, or where not all followers have been ‘inspired’. In many cases, while leadership at the top is strong, the overall leadership capacity of the organisation has not been enhanced, leading to problems being stored up for the future.

Distributed Leadership

These weaknesses of traditional views of transformational leadership have recently led to many researchers and practitioners espousing so-called distributed forms of leadership, involving all staff in leading their organisation.  This view contradicts the traditional view of transformational leadership by stating that transformational practices can reside in all members of an organisation.  The heroic view of leadership has only on occasion been found to be the factor that has lead to organisational improvement (Connell, 1996), while distributed forms of leadership have been found to benefit improvement efforts in a range of studies (Muijs & Harris, 2003, Gronn, 2000). This is why, increasingly, researchers and policymakers have called for a move towards more distributed forms of leadership. Distributed leadership implies that the practice of leadership is stretched within or across an organisation and that there are high degrees of involvement in the practice of leadership (Spillane et al 2001). This ‘deep leadership’ is co-constructed through joint practice drawing in part on yet untapped leadership potential and under-developed resources for collaboration and co-ordination. In this sense distributed leadership is ‘an emergent property of a group or network of individuals in which group members pool their expertise’ (Gronn 2000:23) 

Distributed leadership is “enacted by people at all levels rather than a set of personal characteristics and attributes located in people at the top” (Fletcher & Kaufer, 2003, p. 22). However this does not mean that everyone leads simultaneously or that leadership activity has no agreed or common direction. Instead, it is a form of leadership that brings together both lateral and formal leadership processes in order to generate organizational change and development. It is educational rather than institutional in its focus and is exercised through the liberation of talents within a participatory framework (Fullan, 2005:6) In summary, it is a form of leadership practice where individuals collaborate in order to extend and enhance the leadership capacity within or across organisations. 

Distributed leadership clearly holds theoretical promise in terms of organisational improvement and achievement. However, while there is some evidence linking distributed leadership to organisational growth and change, it remains the case that empirical studies of distributed leadership are relatively limited. As Bennett et al (2003:4) note in their review of the distributed leadership literature that ‘there were almost no empirical studies of distributed leadership in action’. The studies that do exist suggest a favourable relationship between distributed forms of leadership and organisational outcomes. Silns and Mulford’s (2002) comprehensive study of leadership effects on student learning provides some cumulative confirmation of the key processes through which more distributed kinds of leadership influence student learning outcomes. Their work concluded that ‘student outcomes are more likely to improve when leadership sources are distributed throughout the school community and when teachers are empowered in areas of importance to them’. The largest contemporary study of distributed leadership practice in schools concluded that intervening to improve school leadership may not be most optimally achieved by focusing on the individual formal leader and may not offer the best use of resources (Spillane et al 2002). Similarly work by Muijs & Harris (2004) found positive relationships between the extent of teachers’ involvement in decision making and student motivation and self efficacy. Looking at a number of factors, they found quantitative evidence that teacher involvement in leadership had an indirect impact on pupil performance through improving teacher effectiveness (see diagram below)

Hallinger & Heck (2010) similarly report that collaborative school leadership (a somewhat more limited concept than distributed leadership) can lead to improvements in reading and maths, with the relationship being mediated by leaders building the school’s capacity for academic improvement. School capacity itself, however, also shapes schools' collective leadership capacity in a reciprocal relationship. 

Instructional leadership

School effectiveness research has put a lot of stress on the concept of instructional leadership as a key component of effective schools (Teddlie & Reynolds, 2002). Instructional leadership is seen as being concerned with hands-on involvement with teaching and learning processes, and with the headteacher acting as the leader in terms of pedagogy and instruction rather than taking a more hands-off role concerned more strongly with administration, and has been described as those actions that a principal takes, or delegates to others, to promote growth in student learning and making instructional quality the top priority of the school and brings that vision to realization (Hallinger & Heck, 1998). Instructional leaders have a pedagogical vision, have pedagogical expertise and focus on teaching and learning. An instructional leader promotes homogeneous approaches to factors such as teaching and behaviour management in the school, monitors teaching, and makes sure professional development focussed on teaching and learning. In many cases instructional leaders start the process of school improvement by implementing a particular initiative promoting a teaching strategy (Muijs et al, 2004). The relationship between instructional leadership and educational outcomes is quite long established. In one early study, for example, Heck et al (1990) found an indirect relationship wherein three latent variables related to principal instructional leadership (school governance, instructional organization, school climate) affected student achievement. The relationship was still found to be there in an overview of research on instructional leadership conducted 15 years later by Hallinger (2005), and has received consistent confirmation in research.  

 Again, the dualism mentioned earlier comes to the fore, in the sense of contrasting instructional with more administrative leadership. In fairness to authors in the field, instructional leadership is usually seen as a matter of degree rather than an absolute, and  it is acknowledged that administrative functions remain a component of the headteachers work. There is some significant empirical support for instructional leadership (e.g. Hallinger, 1989; Teddlie & Stringfield, 1993), though much of the research is now a decade old, and questions can be asked as to how the strong focus on the headteacher in this body of research fits with conceptions of distributed leadership. Likewise, we can question the extent to which this hands-on approach is still feasible where we see headteachers taking on new roles with regards to leading federations or groups of schools, such as is happening increasingly in the UK. 

Leadership development

Another current orthodoxy is that leadership can be learnt, and is not just an innate quality of individuals. This has meant reorienting practice around leadership development rather than selection of leaders, the underlying view being that everyone has the potential to lead if only they receive the necessary professional development. This view is reflected in investment in leadership development at the national policy level (such as through the formation of the National College for School Leadership in the UK) and in the success of leadership programmes at university level in many countries. This view reflects a more general move away from a belief in fixed innate characteristics determining behaviour, as is also evidenced by the discrediting of the fixed view of IQ as a measure off innate intelligence, and the decrease in gender stereotypical role orientation as again the innateness of many traditional gender roles has been found to be a result of nurture rather than nature (Gould, 1994). 

Therefore, while the view that leadership can be learnt appears to have support (though we must not loose sight of the fact that psychological research does appear to show that genetically determined personality characteristics do exist, e.g. Fredericks five factor), the key question is whether all this activity in leadership development has, in effect, improved leadership in the school. In other words, what is the impact of leadership development, what forms of leadership development have an impact, and is investment in leadership development a cost effective way of improving the education system. The English inspection body, OFSTED, appears to believe that the investment in leadership development through NCSL is paying off:  The Ofsted report, 'Leadership and Management: What Inspection Tells Us’, suggests that some of the improvements in the quality of leadership and management were attributable to headteacher training programmes that began in 1995 and the establishment of NCSL in 2000 (Ofsted, 2005). 

The question that therefore needs to be asked first is to what extent leadership development has an impact on organisational performance. While the potential of continuing professional development to influence organisational performance is assumed in much of the generic literature (Day et al, 2004), it is far from proven. A recent review of the literature concluded that there was insufficient evidence to link leadership development directly to improvements in organisational performance (Glover et al, 2004). A number of evaluations of specific leadership development programmes appear to point to positive effects (e.g. Muijs & Lindsay, 2005; Simkins, 2005), but these typically rely on self-report or satisfaction questionnaires, and have not systematically explored impact. However, the literature on organisational change and improvement would assert that there is an indirect relationship simply because both leadership and continuing professional development feature prominently in many studies of effective organisational change (Berends et al, 2000; OECD, 2002). 

What has become clear in a number of studies is dissatisfaction with some of the more traditional forms of leadership development, such as generic courses and one-off in-service training events delivered by external organisations. In the schools sector there is some evidence of a preference of teachers is towards more experiential modes of CPD (Muijs & Lindsay, 2005), and some authors in Higher Education have likewise pointed to the advantages of experiential leadership development within communities of practice (Knight & Trowler, 2001). Increasingly, research appears to be pointing towards, if not demonstrated higher effectiveness, then at least a higher perceived effectiveness of more experiential forms of professional development that build on the trainee’s background and needs, such as mentoring, job shadowing and secondments (Muijs et al, 2004). Simultaneously, a combination of technological developments and cost effectiveness considerations have led to the development of increased opportunities for individual learning, often through online virtual learning environments, or, more prosaically, distance learning courses. There is some, albeit limited, evidence of a relationship between leadership development methods and leadership styles, Muijs et al (2005) finding a relationship between leadership development and leadership behaviours, with the type of leadership development experienced being related to respondents’ views of leadership in one study in the further education sector in England. Experiential leadership development (leadership development based on direct experience, such as mentoring, coaching and shadowing) appears to be related to transformational leadership, course based leadership development (such as the traditional university or NCSL based course) to distributive leadership and individual based leadership development  (such as learning on your own using distance learning) to transactional leadership. Respondents in this study also expressed a strong preference for experiential leadership development among middle level leaders, and for course-based leadership development amongst senior leaders. Individual leadership development was not found to be popular. Therefore, the evidence base on what constitutes effective leadership development is limited. Interestingly, what we do know is often ignored, in the sense that the most consistent finding is that participants tend to prefer more experiential forms of leadership over course-based approaches, but the reality is that policy makers and educators from higher education tend to promote course based activities for reasons of cost and self-interest. 

The research base and its limitations

We can therefore say that we know something about leadership and its contribution to organisational effectiveness. There is evidence that leadership does make a difference to organisational effectiveness and even to pupil performance. There is some evidence that transformational and distributed leadership in particular can contribute to organisational effectiveness. However, what is equally clear is that the research base is far weaker than many of the claims made for these forms of leadership, and indeed for leadership development, would suggest. There is a tendency, not just in leadership, but in educational research more generally, to jump rapidly from a limited research base to prescriptions for practice, as a result of pressures from governments and their agencies in search of ‘quick fixes’ and from schools in search of solutions to the need for fast improvement as a result of the accountability measures they are forced to work under. Commercial consultants and advocates of particular programmes or movements are often quick to offer such solutions, though higher education holds its share of responsibility for this situation. 

This tendency is exacerbated by the over reliance on dualistic models in the field, which invite prescription through their identification of one set of practices as ‘good’ and another set as ‘bad’. Again, this is not a tendency that is unique to research in the leadership field. Educational research generally suffers from this, as is evidenced in distinctions between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ learning in HE pedagogy (Biggs, 2002), distinctions between ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional methods of teaching, and of course the distinction between ‘effective’ and ‘ineffective’ schools (Reynolds et al, 2004). This tendency to dualise is of course deeply ingrained in Western thought, most often attributed to Descartes duality between mind and body, though in fact the roots lie in earlier Christian (body and soul) and even Ancient Greek philosophy (De Volder, 1982). It is, however, extremely unhelpful if we are truly to understand the complex processes involved in school leadership and the ways in which they can shape organisational culture and performance. It is clearly absurd to set up a duality in which management (‘the body’) is distinct from and inferior to leadership (‘the soul’). Management functions are integral to the running of organisations, and are in practice hard to separate from leadership. Indeed, some commentators have correctly pointed out that much of what is now termed leadership was in the past termed management, or before that, administration (Gunter, 2001). It is clear that if we are to move the field on we will have to go beyond this tendency to set up a dualism, pick one part as being ‘good’ and then recommend this as the way forward for practice. Classification is a necessity for science to progress, but more subtle and broader taxonomies of leadership behaviours may be more illuminating and less prone to simplistic prescriptions. 

As well as a strong reliance of dualism, there is an overreliance on change metaphors in research on educational leadership. This again results in part from the stress on leadership at the expense of management, where leadership is seen as concerned with change and transformation, while management is about maintenance functions in an organisation. The conception that leadership is the key therefore leads to a pre-occupation among authors in the field and among leaders themselves with change. Of course, managing change, and, where necessary, instigating change are important, and in the increasingly unstable and fast moving environment in which schools operate is probably more so than ever (Fullan, 1996). However, the emphasis on change, both in the literature (e.g Kotter, 2000), and in the training programmes for headteachers has led to a situation where every new head feels s/he has to make changes whether they are necessary or not, purely to demonstrate leadership. In my own research I have seen many instances of highly successful schools suffering where new leadership made wide ranging changes to effective schools for reasons that did not stand up to scrutiny and that could in the end be described simply as a desire to change. Educational policy making seems similarly afflicted, with a rapid turnover of policies and initiatives seen as necessary to demonstrate this warped view of leadership. Again, we end up with the problematic nature of dualistic views of leadership. 

That the research base is relatively weak reflects not just a dearth of research compared to prescription, but also deficiencies in research methods. There is a strong overreliance of self-report in leadership studies, where the most common form of research design is either a survey or interviews, usually of a limited number of school leaders. Studies are almost always post-hoc, with longitudinal studies being rare. This practice is clearly limited. Both survey and interview based methodologies, while highly useful, have, when used as the sole means of data collection, some severe limitations. Post hoc interviews are heavily prone to attributional bias (the tendency to attribute to ourselves positive outcomes, while negative outcomes are externally attributed, Weiner, 1980), as well as to self-presentation bias and interviewer expectancy effects (the tendency to give those answers we feel the interviewer wants to hear). Where leaders have received leadership development, there is an increasing tendency to hear the theories learnt on leadership courses repeated in interview situations. Survey questionnaires are likewise limited, especially where they are cross-sectional, as only correlational data can be collected. The issues of expectancy effects and bias exist here as well, as does attributional bias. In one survey study, for example, respondents tended to describe themselves as transformational leaders, while their line managers were described as using transactional leadership styles (Muijs et al, 2006). 

These limitations mean it is often hard to make strong statements either about impact, or about processes. The quantitative methodologies used need more often to be longitudinal, and to make more use of quasi-experimental designs, and even of field trials of new leadership methods such as distributed leadership. Qualitative methods likewise need to be more longitudinal, and employ methods that allow more in-depth interrogation of processes such as ethnographic studies and genuine long-term case studies as well as the methods currently used. 

More original research in the field needs to be undertaken, in particular outside of North America, as the over reliance on findings from studies conducted in the US needs to be alleviated. Leadership, like other factors in education, is contextual, and it is therefore not valid to expect findings to apply unproblematically across countries and even continents. There are obvious contextual differences in terms of leadership relating to the extent of autonomy school leaders have within the educational system, their appointment and selection criteria, while less immediately obvious cultural differences make it even less likely that one could simply import findings from one context to the other without at least some adaptation. Therefore, the tendency to move straight to prescription becomes potentially even more harmful where the research base is from an entirely different context, where school leadership will operate under different circumstances and conditions. 

Therefore, while leadership research has made important contributions to the field of education, that have had practical benefits, if we are genuinely to move both research and practice on we need to do more rigorous quantitative and qualitative research, aimed at both measuring impact and exploring processes, taking into account the complexity of schools as organisations, and refraining from an overly prescriptive approach that, on the basis of very limited research, posits absolute truths about good practice. If we continue the practice of coming up with a never ending stream of poorly researched ideas, sooner or later research in this field is likely to loose credibility in the eyes of both practitioners and researchers, loosing the possible benefits of genuinely improving what remains one of the key factors in educational effectiveness.  

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