Distributed Leadership As Work Redesign: Retrofitting The Job Characteristics Model

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Distributed Leadership as Work Redesign: Retroﬁtting the Job Characteristics

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Distributed Leadership as Work Redesign: Retrofitting the Job Characteristics

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David Mayrowetz a; Joseph Murphy b; Karen Seashore Louis c; Mark A. Smylie a
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DOI: 10.1080/15700760601091275
Distributed Leadership as Work Redesign:

Retrofitting the Job Characteristics Model
DAVID MAYROWETZ
University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
JOSEPH MURPHY
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
KAREN SEASHORE LOUIS

Downloaded By: [University of Minnesota] At: 20:06 9 April 2009
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
MARK A. SMYLIE
University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
In this article, we revive work redesign theory, specifically

Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model (JCM), to
examine distributed leadership initiatives. Based on our early
observations of six schools engaged in distributed leadership reform
and a broad review of literature, including empirical tests of work
redesign theory, we retrofit the JCM by: (1) adding more transition
mechanisms to explain how changes in work could lead to the
widespread performance of leadership functions; (2) accounting
for distributed leadership reform as a group work redesign; and
(3) enumerating relevant contextual variables that should impact
the development, shape, and success of such reforms.
DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP AS WORK REDESIGN: RETROFITTING

THE JOB CHARACTERISTICS MODEL
The “buzz” surrounding the concept of distributed leadership has traveled

well beyond the educational leadership research community (Archer, 2004).
This article was supported by a grant from the Laboratory for Student Success at Temple University to
Vanderbilt University and a separate grant from Vanderbilt University. Responsibility for the conclusions
offered here rests entirely with the authors.
Address correspondence to David Mayrowetz, University of Illinois at Chicago, College
of Education, 1040 W. Harrison Street, M/C 147, Chicago, IL 60607. E-mail: [email protected]
69
70 D. Mayrowetz, J. Murphy, K. S. Louis, and M. A. Smylie
Several schools are now engaged in what are commonly called “distributed
leadership” initiatives. We use the quotation marks consciously because many
people consider distributed leadership to be a prescription for school reform
rather than as originally intended, a descriptive theoretical lens (Gronn,
2000; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2001). For purposes of consistency
and convenience, throughout the rest of this article we use the prescriptive
definition, unless otherwise noted.
Generally, these reforms are characterized by groups of teachers
becoming more formal leaders and undertaking tasks they would not do
traditionally, including some work that would be perceived as administrative.
In many schools, the impetus for distributed leadership reform can be traced
to state policymakers and influential members of the educational leadership
policy network like the Education Commission of the States, the Council of
Chief State School Officers, and the Wallace Foundation. In fact, promoting
distributed leadership is a focus in many of the twenty-four states receiving

a second round of funding for State Action Education Leadership Projects
(SAELP), activities supported by the three organizations above and others
(see Massachusetts Commonwealth School Leadership Project, 2004; Mutter,
2003).
Like any school reform efforts, some of these distributed leadership initia-
tives will succeed and others will not. As researchers interested in schools
as organizations and the organizational change that distributed leadership
projects are trying to achieve, we need a conceptual model to study and
understand these reforms. Indeed, the task is especially pressing for us as we
are currently studying six secondary schools that are implementing SAELP-
inspired distributed leadership reforms. The goal of this manuscript is to
provide our field with new insights into how to predict whether distributed
leadership projects will take hold and work in schools.
One, almost obvious, way to think about these distributed leadership
initiatives is to use theories of work redesign. Specifically, if distributed
leadership in schools is to begin, teachers must start to conceive of their
roles differently and must assume responsibilities beyond their classrooms
for purposes of overall school improvement. As teachers’ jobs are redefined
in this model, so too must be administrators’ jobs if they are to maintain their
function as supporting teachers and setting the conditions for their success.
Administrators will need to do to more than delegate tasks or relinquish
authority; they must manage the boundaries among several workgroups,
while being active participants within them. Moreover, they must coordinate
that work to maintain coherence in the building. And teachers and adminis-
trators need to relate to each other in new ways, given these redefined roles
and workplace responsibilities.
A few years ago, two of us first argued that if properly enacted, distributed
leadership reforms are essentially a form of work redesign that holds great
promise for school improvement (Mayrowetz & Smylie, 2004). Extending that
Distributed Leadership as Work Redesign 71
work, the central premise of this article is that often overlooked theories of
work redesign reopen a well-worn but underutilized path for understanding
the development, implementation, and success of distributed leadership
reforms in schools. In this article, we revive work redesign theory, specif-
ically Hackman and Oldham’s (1980) Job Characteristics Model (JCM) and
customize it to the study of distributed leadership. Our retrofitting process
is informed by three sources: meta-analyses of the JCM, empirical evidence
drawn from other redesign efforts in schools (e.g., career ladders, mentors,
participative decision making), and our initial observations from the first two
rounds of data collection in six secondary schools purposefully trying to
enact distributed leadership. These sources lead us to a number of additional
theoretical lenses that we believe are necessary to bring to bear for under-
standing the development of distributed leadership in schools, their eventual
success or failure, and, in turn, school improvement.
In the rest of this article, we refresh our readers’ memories about Hackman
and Oldham’s theory and their model. Then, we present an elaborated JCM to
guide the study of distributed leadership in schools, highlighting the addition
of two new transition mechanisms as well as several contextual variables that
we believe serve as moderators and antecedents to our model. We conclude
with suggestions for future research directions for understanding distributed
leadership reforms. Due to the constraints of space, we do not provide our
readers with data-based illustrations of the viability of our model in this first
installment of the presentation of our research.
THE ORIGINAL JCM
In Work Redesign, Hackman and Oldham (1980) contend that a major factor
in organizational improvement is the “person-job relationship,” (p. 4). They
claim that many problems in the workplace can be traced to the design
of work rather than the will of employees to engage it. By focusing on
“the work itself” (p. 42), they argue, employers could increase internal work
motivation, which would eventually lead to higher employee productivity
and effectiveness. Hackman and Oldham outline their theory in the job
characteristics model (JCM) displayed in Figure 1.
Central to their model (both figuratively and literally) are the “critical
psychological states” which the redesign of work is meant to create. Hackman
and Oldham believe that employees should experience greater meaning-
fulness in their work if they are required to use a variety of skills, if they
accomplish a unique and identifiable task from start to finish, and if their
work is significant. Employees should feel more responsible for their work
when they are given autonomy of that work. Finally, as long as employees
are provided with adequate feedback, they will know the results of their
work. In sum, if work entails the five core job characteristics on the left,
Core Job Characteristics Psychological States Outcomes

Task Variety
Meaningfulness
Task Identity Internal Motivation
Efficient Performance
Task Significance
Satisfaction with Job
Responsibility
Autonomy
Knowledge of
Feedback results
Moderators
Individual Skills and Experience

Growth Need Strength
Satisfaction with Workplace
FIGURE 1 Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model (1980).
employees will start to experience their work in ways that will motivate them
to better outcomes, which are shown on the right.
Hackman and Oldham recognize that a few conditions would moderate
the process of redesigned work leading to motivated and productive
employees. They hypothesize that individual employees’ knowledge and
skill and their desire to achieve in the face of challenges and grow profes-
sionally (i.e., growth need) would impact whether redesigned work would
have the desired effect. They believe that an employee’s satisfaction with the
workplace would also affect internal motivation and workplace efficiency as
well.
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE JOB

CHARACTERISTICS MODEL
Since the JCM has been around for over a quarter century, there have
been numerous studies that have employed it. Meta-analyses and rigorous
empirical research in a variety of settings demonstrate that the model is
structurally sound (Fried & Ferris, 1987; Johns, Xie & , Fang, 1992). Both
the multidimensionality of work redesign and the correlation of those core
job characteristics to affective and behavioral outcomes are well established
(Fried & Ferris, 1987). In short, the job characteristics model is sturdy and
robust enough to provide an excellent starting point for examining the
creation and consequences of a work redesign like distributed leadership.
However, these studies also demonstrate four weaknesses in the original
JCM that pose problems to its applicability for studying distributed leadership.
First, the research suggests some uncertainty about the role of psychological
states as intervening variables. A meta-analysis found that the model worked
fine without them (Fried & Ferris, 1987), while another study believed they
were important mediators between the core characteristics and the affective
and behavioral outcomes (Johns, Xie, & Fang, 1992). Most recently, Renn
and Vanderberg (1995) conclude that the critical psychological states were
only partial mediators in the model.
Second, one of the key findings of the empirical tests of the JCM is that
the “relationships between job characteristics and psychological outcomes is
more consistent and stronger than the relationship between job characteristics
and behavioral outcomes” (Fried & Ferris, 1987, p. 313). In other words, the
JCM predicts employee motivation and job satisfaction better than it predicts
job performance.
Third, researchers are not quite sure how moderators relate to the rest
of the model. While Fried and Ferris (1987) find some of their effects to be
“largely artifactual” (p. 314), others conclude that individual and contextual
variables did have significant relationships to the model (Johns, Xie, &
Fang, 1992; Loher, Noe, Moeller, & Fitzgerald, 1985). Interestingly though,
sometimes the moderators from the original JCM operate in the direction
opposite than what was expected. Most recently, there have been claims that
the JCM is too “context insensitive” and that it suffers from “important missing
components . . . [including] limited consideration of the contingencies likely
to moderate these links [between job characteristics and outcomes]” (Parker,
Wall, & Cordery, 2001, p. 417).
Because the JCM was developed for studying work in factories before
the “paradigm shift” that led to the widespread adoption of multipurpose
work teams in the 1980s (Ketchum, 1984 cited in Sundstrom, De Meuse, &
Futrell, 1990), it is more readily applicable to the study of work redesign for
individual employees than for groups. While Hackman and Oldham devote
a section of their book to group work redesign, they largely focus on how
certain variables would impact the internal workings of the group (e.g.,
norms and composition) to predict effectiveness. They pay scant attention to
organizational factors.
WORK REDESIGN IN SCHOOLS
An examination of research in schools that is framed by theories of work

redesign also provides guidance for how to improve upon the JCM and
customize it for a school reform specifically. In the main, research using
work redesign theory in schools has been fruitful and its results reinforce the
strengths and weaknesses of the model noted above. Studies demonstrate the
power of “enriched work” (i.e., work that shares the core job characteristics
of the JCM). For example, teachers who assume nonteaching duties, and
therefore have higher skill variety, tend to have better attitudes about their
jobs (Rosenblatt, 2001).
With work redesign efforts in schools though (e.g., career ladders, the
creation of formal mentor positions, teaming, and participative decision
making) most studies are unable to detect considerable spillover from
positive emotions to improved performance. For example, teachers with
formal mentors roles frequently gain a lot of professional satisfaction from
working with protégés (Hart, 1985) and most studies show positive affective
outcomes from mentoring for veteran and new teachers (Smylie, 1997).
However, the results of teacher mentoring program on student achievement
are mixed. Similarly, studies show that lead teacher programs have had “few
benefits at the classroom level” (Smylie, 1997, p. 548) or for other teachers
within the building (Smylie, 1994). Participative decision making (PDM) can
increase teachers’ sense of organizational responsibility (Smylie, 1997) and
self-efficacy (Lee, Dedrick, & Smith, 1991), but does little to change instruc-
tional behaviors or improve student achievement (Conway 1984; Conway
& Calzi, 1996). In fact, too much or too little participation can be counter-
productive and lead to dissatisfaction (Conway, 1976). Teacher teaming can
lead to professional satisfaction (Crow & Pounder, 2000) and student satis-
faction with their teachers (Pounder, 1999), and even teacher self-reports
of improved effectiveness (Conley, Fauske, & Pounder, 2004) but generally
speaking, the impact of teacher teams rarely leads to student achievement or
the overall improvement of the school (Smylie, Conley, & Marks, 2002). The
general conclusion that we draw from these studies is that the research inves-
tigating the redesign of work in schools does detect beneficial outcomes,
but they are usually affective outcomes for the employees whose job is
changed. These effects can reach others but only do so rarely. We are left
to wonder whether the JCM or possibly the redesign efforts themselves
are missing elements by which researchers can find wider, behavioral
impacts.
Furthermore, in school settings, moderating variables at both the
individual and organizational levels were very important in most studies of
job redesign efforts. An individual characteristic, like years of experience,
proved important when studying a career ladder program in Utah. The career
ladder seemed to attract novice teachers to working in schools (Murphy,
Hart, & Walters, 1989), but did not make them more likely to commit to their
districts (or the profession) on a long-term basis (Hart, 1994). Only midcareer
teachers relayed that they were more likely to remain in their school districts
because of the program (Ebmeier & Hart, 1992).
An organizational component like the trust in a principal can also be
crucial. When educators perceive a PDM initiative as a principal’s technique
for manipulating them, they view that work redesign with skepticism
(Firestone, 1977). A recent review of literature concluded that teacher teams
are most productive when their members understand the context of their
school, have previous experience working together, and have strong internal
leadership (Smylie, Conley, & Marks, 2002).
Finally, we note that unlike a lot of the research conducted in factories

from the twentieth century, in schools there are both collective and individual
work redesigns. Teacher career ladders and mentor programs redesign
an individual’s work. Teacher teams and the participative decision-making
policies popular in the 1990s have a collective orientation. These collective
work redesigns seem to share a common goal, to foster collaboration and
reverse the tradition of teacher isolation in schools.
Our interpretation of these meta-analyses and the empirical studies of
work redesign in schools leads us to the conclusion that the contours of
the JCM are sturdy enough and well-suited for understanding distributed
leadership projects in schools. However, the original incarnation of the JCM
has some important deficiencies generally, and in relation to schools as
workplaces specifically. The first problematic area is the strong focus on
individual-level redesign at the expense of group redesign. Second, the role
of motivation as the sole transition mechanism from redesigned work to

effectiveness outcomes is questionable. The intervening effect of the three
psychological states in the JCM are in doubt and there is a tendency of
work redesign research to be more useful for describing affective outcomes
like employee satisfaction. In schools, the research usually indicates positive
outcomes only for those whose work is redesigned. To study distributed
leadership, a reform that is supposed to lead to overall school improvement,
we need a better understanding of how redesigned work can lead to behav-
ioral outcomes schoolwide.
The final underdeveloped area is the insufficient recognition of the impor-
tance of context-specific moderating variables. Since we are going to look
at a reform that has such broad goals in a complex organization, our model
needs to account for more than individual level moderators. We will need to
include organizational moderators that impact the process of implementing
distributed leadership. In fact, these organizational characteristics can even
shape the original design of the reform and serve as antecedents to this
model.
AN ELABORATED MODEL FOR THE STUDY

OF DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP
With all of the accumulated wisdom about the JCM and empirical evidence
from redesign efforts in schools, we propose a model that elaborates the JCM
to understand distributed leadership projects in schools (see Figure 2). This
model contains our best understanding of how and why efforts to develop
distributed leadership in schools would operate and serves as a starting
point for predicting the success (or failure) of these reforms. Our conceptual
model outlines additional mechanisms by which changes in work would lead
to psychological and behavioral outcomes. Recognizing the importance of
Outcomes
Redesigned Work Transition Mechanisms
Performance of
Characteristics of Sensemaking Leadership Functions
Redesigned Work under What does this new work • Providing & selling a
Distributed Leadership mean in this context? vision
Reform • Providing encouragement
• Skill Variety and recognition
Motivation • Obtaining resources School
• Task Identity Do these changes in
Task Meaningfulness • Adapting SOPs improvement
• work make me happier
• Balancing of Autonomy • Monitoring the
and more excited about
and Interdependence improvement effort
my job?
• Feedback • Handling Disturbances
Learning
Do the changes in work
allow me to learn how to
do this redesigned job
better?
Antecedents/Moderators
Individual — Knowledge, skills, growth-need, satisfaction with workplace

Organizational —Organizational stability (includingprincipal succession), Organizational
Structures, School Culture, Relational Trust, Micropolitics
FIGURE 2 Distributed Leadership as Work Redesign.
context, we add multiple moderating/antecedent variables at the organiza-

tional level to the individual moderators suggested by the original model.
We note that this model is also based in part on our early impres-
sions of distributed leadership reforms in six schools. Through some initial
rounds of explanation building (Yin, 2004) at regular meetings and the first
author’s review of completed case study protocols designed to tap our initial
theorizing about our schools (Yin, 2004), we determined that all of these
additional transition mechanisms and antecedent/moderators were important
to distributed leadership development and implementation.
We emphasize that the goal of this manuscript is to provide our field with
new insights into how to predict whether distributed leadership projects will
take hold and work in schools. Whether distributed leadership can actually
lead to school improvement, and if so, under what conditions, are important
empirical questions but beyond the scope of what we are trying to achieve
here. We discuss this point further at the end of this article.
First, we explicate our model in greater detail. To do this, we start with a
description of how these “distributed leadership” projects are, at their core,
work redesign for both teachers and administrators. In doing so, we provide
details of how the five original core job characteristics are important aspects
in distributed leadership reform and how they might impact its success or
failure. After defining what we mean by the implementation of distributed
leadership, we describe how motivation, learning, and sensemaking are
transition mechanisms for turning jobs with the characteristics into distributed
leadership practice. Then, we look at five contextual antecedent/moderators
in greater detail and demonstrate their importance throughout the process
of developing distributed leadership, from how they shape the formulation

of redesigned work for teachers and administrators, to the way they affect
the transition mechanisms, to how they could influence the performance of
leadership functions.
DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP AND THE CORE JOB

CHARACTERISTICS
Based on experiences in our six case study schools, we believe that the
original five core job characteristics encompass much of what are important
aspects of educators’ work in the context of a distributed leadership reform.
We discuss each job characteristic briefly here and, when appropriate, we
include our observations of how distributed leadership might not only
increase these elements in jobs but also decrease them.
Skill Variety
One of the more recognizable ways in which these distributed leadership
reforms redesign work is that they require teachers and administrators to use
a variety of skills on the job. Of course, both traditional classroom teaching
and school administration are complex and multidimensional activities that
call upon educators to utilize several technical and interpersonal skills. But
when teachers and administrators agree to work together, through distributed
leadership, to address the panoply of issues facing public schools, many
of these skills, and more, must be utilized. There can be little doubt that
implementing distributed leadership expands educators’ job scopes.
State officials in charge of the distributed leadership projects in three of
our schools recognized that educators needed to learn or relearn commu-
nication techniques and other interpersonal skills to facilitate the uptake of
these distributed leadership programs, especially in struggling schools. A
consultant was hired to work with successive cohorts of educators from these
schools to build those necessary skills.
We hypothesize that as distributed leadership reforms increase skill
variety, many educators will become more motivated, as the original JCM
predicts. Simultaneously, though, implementers will need to attend to the
learning mechanisms (i.e., educators need to learn how to use more skills
well) so that the motivation inspired by the greater skill variety can be
sustained and lead to denser and more effective leadership practice.
Task Significance
Teachers and administrators already are likely to conceive of their work as
significant. However, if educators have their jobs redesigned, there is a danger
that they might see their new work, which takes time from their traditional
responsibilities, as less meaningful. Specifically, a teacher might feel that any
time not spent directly focused on her students might be wasted. On the
other hand, if framed properly, teachers will understand that engaging work
at the school level could impact more students than those in their classes.
Surely, they would perceive their new work as highly significant, an argument
that “may be highly attractive to many teachers” (Willower, 1991, p. 448).
Similarly, administrators need to understand that developing the desire and
capacity of teachers to engage in leadership practice is worthwhile and does
not threaten their power and authority. Thus, we propose that initiators
of distributed leadership in schools will need to “sell” the significance of
distributed leadership more than might be expected of other work redesigns
in other environments to activate the motivational and educational potential
of the new work.
Task Identity
Unlike these first two core job characteristics, teachers generally don’t
experience a great deal of task identity in their traditional work. Like workers
on an assembly line, teachers who are “egg-cartoned” in their classrooms
might understand their job as taking students from one point to the next
(i.e., teaching a student third-grade mathematics in preparation for fourth
grade). In fact, a distributed leadership reform, such as the example in
Chavez Elementary in Texas (Maxcy & Nguyen, 2006), can be an antidote to
“a fragmented and incoherent instructional program stem[ming] from weak
instructional leadership and . . . maintained through dysfunctional intraschool
communication and norms of noninterference” (p. 169). Thus, participating
in a distributed leadership reform could enable teachers to climb out of their
discipline and classroom-based mentalities and develop a more system-level
understanding of the school and how to improve outcomes for students.
While engaged in a distributed leadership initiative, teachers’ work can have
task identity if it begins with the creation of a vision and continues through
monitoring (see section on leadership functions below). In sum, we predict
that if through these distributed leadership reforms educators, especially
teachers, can have more task identity, their motivation to participate and the
understandings they can glean about the school and how it operates will
likely increase.
Autonomy
When viewing distributed leadership as a reform effort, a repeated refrain
about its novelty is the push for collective responsibility. One of the earliest
calls for distributed leadership came from Neuman and Simmons, who urged:
everyone associated with schools—principals, teachers, school staff

members, district personnel, parents, community members, and
students—to take responsibility for student achievement and to assume
leadership roles in areas in which they are competent and skilled . . .
collective responsibility breeds ownership (2000, p. 10)
On the other hand, we must recognize that individual autonomy and

independence are hallmarks of teachers’ work in classrooms (Little, 1990).
While several important decisions regarding curriculum materials and content
standards are made outside their classroom, many teachers believe they can
close their classroom door and isolate themselves from the rest of the school
to work with their children without much interference. So ironically, being
a part of a team of teachers and administrators and working on a new
initiative within a distributed leadership framework might actually decrease
the individual autonomy that a teacher experiences. Several individuals can

now impact his performance in these newer aspects of his job. Indeed, as
distributed leadership requires joint work the result can easily be interdepen-
dence rather than individual autonomy.
Simultaneously, distributed leadership allows for the increase of collective
autonomy among a team working toward a particular goal. That is, a team
may be autonomous from a principal in determining the focus and nature of
its work. Still, the tension exists between allowing a group to have autonomy
and providing specific direction from administrators who are frequently seen
as accountable by external actors and as formal organizational leaders by
internal ones. We are reminded that “it is important to achieve a balance
point between the team’s desire for decision-making authority and the organi-
zation’s need for coordination and control” (Conley, et al., 2004, p. 693).
Therefore, we believe that distributed leadership reforms will likely
decrease individual autonomy of teachers in their traditional work, but
may enhance their collective autonomy in their new work. Administrator
autonomy will likely decrease within a distributed leadership reform as their
traditional work arenas may be open to scrutiny not only from their superiors
but also from their faculties. This general shift toward collective autonomy
should lead to successful distributed leadership practice given proper organi-
zational conditions such as a deep reservoir of trust, healthy micropolitics,
and organizational stability (see below).
Feedback
When Hackman and Oldham talk about feedback, they argue that the best
form of it comes from the work itself. In a complex endeavor like education,
accurate feedback from work is difficult to attain, but it is possible through
techniques like action research and collective inquiry. One strategy for
school change in which feedback is an essential component, the Bay Area
School Reform Collaborative’s Cycle of Inquiry, is “conceived to promote

growth in all three organizational pre-conditions necessary for distributed
leadership . . . to flourish” (Copland, 2003a, p. 381).1 Thus, feedback in a
distributed leadership reform may most likely come from a process in which
a work group of educators engages data they collect about implementation.
Feedback, more than any other aspect of an initiative, has the potential to
activate learning among the educators involved in this reform. But unless
individuals and groups are willing to listen to feedback, including constructive
criticism, then the inherent value of the groupwork will be compromised.
The manner in which educators make sense of the feedback they receive
and learn from it will be crucial for the success of a distributed leadership
reform.
DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP PRACTICE
Over the past several decades, the definition of leadership in our field has
evolved from a singular individual’s traits, to an organizational quality (Ogawa
& Bossert, 1995), to the descriptive version of distributed leadership—an
idea so conceptually vast that it is difficult to separate what does and
doesn’t constitute leadership (Gronn, 2003; Mayrowetz, 2005). For purposes
of our model, which focuses on distributed leadership as a reform, we
need to understand the practice of this reform as something tangible that
should lead to school improvement. Because the original conception of
distributed leadership is for description, not for action, there aren’t many
powerful definitions of what a successful distributed leadership reform might
look like.
We select Firestone and Heller’s formulation of leadership (Firestone,
1989; Heller & Firestone, 1995) for our model because by minimizing the
importance of role and foregrounding leadership functions for school change,
they provide a straightforward and concise framework for understanding
what leadership might look like in a school with a successful distributed
leadership program. These six functions,
• providing and selling a vision,

• providing encouragement and recognition,
• obtaining resources,
• adapting standard operating procedures,
• monitoring the improvement effort, and
• handling disturbances,
1
These three preconditions are: a culture of “collaboration, trust, professional learning and reciprocal
accountability” (Copland, 2003a, p. 379); a shared belief in what problems the school faces; and sufficient
expertise in the school to actualize improvement.
have been empirically tested in the implementation of a social problem

solving reform (Heller & Firestone, 1995) and the inclusion of students with
special needs in general education classrooms (Mayrowetz & Weinstein,
1999). Spillane and his colleagues (2004) recognized “macrofunctions” similar
to these, as a crucial framework for understanding the practice of leadership
in schools. Others have borrowed this six-function framework to test
distributed leadership theory in schools (Maxcy & Nguyen, 2006).
We discuss two important elements of the practice of distributed
leadership to demonstrate how these six macrofunctions capture some of the
work of teachers and administrators as they implement it.
One crucial task in a distributed leadership endeavor is boundary
management. Traditionally, the two boundaries that are most important for
administrators to attend to are the lines between the technical core of teachers
and administrators and the line between the school and the community in
which it sits (i.e., parents, business, taxpayers, etc.). In a school engaged in

distributed leadership reform, there are likely to be multiple internal groups
of educators, groups that include teachers and administrators, all working
on separate but interdependent aspects of the school, and as a result, more
boundaries to manage. As organizational theorists have pointed out, for
groups to maintain their identities but not be too isolated from the whole
organization, a group boundary needs “continual management to ensure that
it becomes neither too sharply delineated nor too permeable” (Sundstrom,
De Meuse, & Futrell, 1990, p. 130). In terms of the leadership functions, this
type of boundary management is essentially monitoring the innovation and
we imagine that without the performance of this leadership function, school
improvement would be unlikely.
A related activity in distributed leadership reform is “crafting coherence”
(Honig & Hatch, 2004). If distributed leadership initiatives are to facilitate
more open and democratic decision-making processes (Neuman & Simmons,
2000), teachers or other members of the school community will bring their
agendas together with those of administrators and external forces (i.e., school
districts, local business groups, etc.) whose influence is always present.
There is a danger that with all of these agendas converging, confusion and
compromise will lead to an incoherent direction for the school. All educators,
but especially administrators who still maintain the formal authority and
accountability in schools, must ensure that a coherent vision is established
and maintained. These kinds of actions are captured under the first function,
providing and selling a vision, and again, without a coherent vision schools
are unlikely to improve.
TRANSITION MECHANISMS
With both the changes in the design characteristics of the work and the
practice of distributed leadership explicated, we now focus on transition
mechanisms. How do these job characteristics translate into educators

engaging in leadership, as defined by the six macrofunctions?
Motivation
In the original JCM, Hackman and Oldham believed that the more stimulating
work experience would motivate employees to become more satisfied and
productive. They laid out their reasoning very clearly:
When a job is high in motivating potential, people who work on the

job tend to experience positive affect when they perform well. And
performing well, for most people, means producing high quality work of
which one can be proud (p. 91, emphasis in original).
The potency of work redesign to motivate employees, including teachers,

is substantial and cannot be dismissed. One study that used the JCM as a
theoretical framework found that a teacher teaming initiative had a strong
motivational impact and led to significantly more teacher satisfaction, profes-
sional commitment, and even knowledge of students relative to teachers at
a control school (Pounder, 1999).
However, as we suggested above, the JCM’s sole focus on motivation
has clearly kept it from accounting for other processes that might translate
redesigned work into changes in workplace performance, positively or
negatively. In the shorthand of policy implementation, the JCM has been able
to demonstrate how redesigned work is able to spur increased will but it has
not shown much in terms of changes in capacity.
In this elaborated model for understanding distributed leadership reforms,
we argue that researchers need to be aware of more than the motiva-
tional impact of work redesign. We need to consider other mechanisms by
which redesigned work will lead to the effective performance of leadership
functions. We posit that the job redesign through the promotion of distributed
leadership will have to enable educators to learn how to perform these
leadership tasks. Moreover, educators’ perceptions of this reform, and of
their school community, will impact their willingness to engage distributed
leadership. We start by explaining sensemaking as a transition process in our
elaborated model.
Sensemaking
Since Weick introduced the notion of sensemaking into the organizational
literature in the late 1970s, it has proven to be an important bridge between
psychological (i.e., individual-focus) and sociological (i.e., collective-focus)
perspectives on organizations. On the one hand, individuals can be said to
“make sense” of their individual experiences in organizations (Harris, 1994),
largely operating through “schemas” or “mental models” that individuals

bring to the setting (Harris, 1994; Louis, 1980; Senge, 1990). On the other
hand, most scholars argue that the organization itself is a social construct
within which people test their individual schemas in organized and informal
settings, and create a collective understanding that is greater than (or at least
different from) the sum of the individual parts.
In particular, it is argued that the concept of organizational culture is a
collective phenomenon (it is not possible to reduce the concept of culture to
individual attitudes and behaviors) that is based in a collective sensemaking
process (Harris, 1994; Louis, Febey, & Schroeder, 2005; Ouchi & Wilkins,
1985). Furthermore, the relationship between individual and organization
is dynamic. Under conditions of organizational change, like a distributed
leadership project, individual responses help to shape the emerging culture
or group shifts. Simultaneously, how individuals respond is also affected
by the collective “sense” that members have about “how things should be
around here” (Gioia, Thomas, Clark, & Chittipeddi, 1994).
What does it mean to “make sense” of a change as radical as a redesigned
workplace or job? In general, most popular and scholarly authors assume
that changes in a job (e.g., increases in skill variety, task significance
and/or autonomy) produce significant stress—stress that in the original JCM
is handled individually. When approached from a collective sensemaking
perspective, successful job redesign involves drawing on the organizational
culture and creating a new collective set of beliefs that permit the change to
take hold among most members, despite stress. Some of the characteristics
of the existing organizational culture that support more effective transitions
(both of individuals and the group) in a job redesign are unsurprising and
consistent with research in schools—trust, and the collective empowerment
of the group (Mishra & Spreitzer, 1998).
Empirical studies from outside the field of education affirm that sense-
making is a central mechanism for understanding the relationships between
job elements and larger social structures (e.g., schools, society-at-large).
For example, a study that looked at “dirty” occupations (such as butchers,
dentists, and funeral directors) suggests that it is collective occupational
reframing, recalibrating, and refocusing that helps people whose jobs are
considered “icky” by the general population to create an ideology that
supports “getting dirtier” as a social good (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999). In
terms of our model, this study suggests that sensemaking is one way in
which professionals draw on some elements of their work and their collective
understanding of their profession to make sense of their work as having high
social significance.
Other studies of organizational downsizing, which has no apparent
positive benefit for individuals, indicate that it is the ability of the “survivors”
to make sense of their changed jobs, social context, and functions that allow
them to move forward (McKinley, Zhao, & Rust, 2000). Trice and Beyer
(1984) argue that transitions in jobs are often accompanied by rites and rituals
that permit people to move forward—some of those that are dominant in
schools include rites of passage (electing or nominating members to a teacher
leadership role) and rites of renewal (offering professional development
activities when a school develops a new model of teacher leadership, even
when everyone acknowledges that they are limited in scope and potential
impact).
Learning
The other transition mechanism we add to motivation is learning. Where there
is a new task for someone to do, people have to learn how to perform it. What
is it that teachers need to know to become leaders in the context of these
distributed leadership reforms? Consider, for example, the first leadership
function articulated by Heller and Firestone (1995), providing and selling a

vision. The skills required to perform this function for an audience of adults
may extend beyond what is in a teacher’s traditional repertoire. However,
there is a knowledge base about how to exercise influence in this way—
how to become a change agent—that might be applicable. We know that
teachers have broad stores of capital to influence instruction in urban schools
(Spillane, Hallett, & Diamond, 2003), but presumably that is a result of their
teaching expertise. Would teachers need more human and cultural capital to
sell noninstructional reforms and if so, how would they attain it?
Learning from administrators and others within the school community
would be a first logical place. As people process information in groups, they
generate creative new solutions that, at least for some kinds of problems, are
better than those that could have been generated alone. The importance of
organizational learning is hard to overstate:
We identify renewal of the overall enterprise as the underlying

phenomenon of interest and organizational learning as a principal means
to this end . . . (We are) presenting organizational learning as four
processes—intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing—
linking the individual, group, and organizational levels. (Gibson &
Zellmer-Bruhn, 2001)
But Brown and Duguid (2001) argue that when we emphasize the impor-
tance of “communities of practice,” we often overemphasize community and
underemphasize practice. In schools, where a lot of knowledge is practice-
based, this means that too little attention is given to who knows what, and
how that knowledge can be spread.
To complicate the concept of learning, though, we have in mind not only
technical learning, but also nontraditional types of learning that are seemingly
invisible, both to people in and outside the organization (Weick, 1991).
Specifically, the adaptations made by high school teachers to longstanding

state policies often involve change, but even the teachers themselves have
difficulty articulating what is happening in their classrooms as a result of
conversations with their colleagues (Louis et al., 2005). Learning may also
appear discontinuous, as when there is a major, “comprehensive change
program” introduced and many practices are disrupted at once, or when a
new policy (like data-based decision making) unexpectedly alters the expec-
tations that teachers must react to (Louis et al., 2005). In most cases, however,
even discontinuous or major change events involve a marginally visible trail
of interactions, meetings, on-the-fly observations and other events that have
the effect of changing what people know. In addition, in schools (as in other
organizations), learning about how to do professional work does not require
the formal process of unlearning, formally confronting new ideas, testing
them out in practice, etc. Instead, it is gradual, and involves trial-and-error
and learning from small errors (Kuwada, 1998).
MODERATOR/ANTECEDENTS
The second major elaboration that we make to the JCM is the addition
of organizational level moderators to the model. As we did when briefly
describing motivation as a transition mechanism, we stipulate to the impor-
tance of an existing element in the model, in this case, the individual-level
moderators like growth need (i.e., the desire of an employee to develop
professionally and achieve). Consistent with Harris’s (2004) warning that “It
would be naïve to ignore major structural, cultural, and micropolitical barriers
operating in schools that make distributed forms of leadership difficult to
implement,” (p. 19), we include those three variables and two others, trust and
organizational stability, to our elaborated model. Further, we argue that these
crucial contextual elements not only impact the way distributed leadership is
implemented (i.e., they are moderators), but they also shape how distributed
leadership is formulated at schools (i.e., they are antecedents). Because
organizational history and stability is a superordinate consideration that
impacts the other four variables, we conclude with that element.
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE
An organization’s structures reflect its unique history including the decisions

of its founders (Bobbitt & Ford, 1980) and, especially in the public sector,
its relationship to its environment (Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967/1986; Joiner,
1961). Other factors like size, available technology, and the regularities of its
institutional sector (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) can play influential roles in the
development of organizational structures as well. In turn, these structures,
particularly those that dictate the division of labor and use of time, have
direct consequences for organizational processes and outcomes. When a

work redesign initiative like distributed leadership enters a school, existing
organizational structures can have a powerful effect on implementation.
In schools, like many modern organizations, one of the first structures to
consider is the hierarchical division of labor between line and staff. Hierar-
chies serve many purposes within organizations like motivating subordinates,
providing expertise, and setting goals. Work redesign, especially in the form
of distributed leadership, can potentially substitute for hierarchy and achieve
many of these goals (Lawler, 1988). However, it would seem unlikely that
educators would abandon their formal hierarchical roles, especially those
at the top who derive power and responsibility from it. Furthermore, the
hierarchy is one of the ingrained regularities of schooling which would be
difficult to change.
So even in a school or school district with a distributed leadership orien-
tation, the formal hierarchical structure is still a crucial element to consider in

the development and operation of reform because it grants few individuals
the ability to perform certain leadership tasks. For example, in one school
district that practiced distributed leadership for an inclusion reform, only a
special education supervisor had the positional power to create a special
line item in the budget that captured funds saved from eliminating out-of-
district special education placements to be applied toward teacher aides and
other forms of in-class support for students with special needs (Mayrowetz &
Weinstein, 1999). In short, though distributed leadership is meant to flatten
the hierarchy, existing organizational structures will not completely disappear
and some of the unique job responsibilities that derive from hierarchy will
still impact the implementation of this reform.
A signature division of labor that is important to consider, especially when
distributed leadership is implemented in high schools, is the departmental
structure based on discipline specialization. The strength of the departmental
structure is hard to overstate:
subject departments form the primary organizational unit of the high

school, defining in crucial ways who teachers are, what they do, where
and with whom they work, and how that work is perceived by others.
(Siskin & Little, 1995, p. 1)
In many schools, departments balkanize the faculty, that is they create

relatively isolated, impermeable social and professional networks based on
subject specific identities (Hargreaves & Macmillan, 1995). Even when depart-
ments are intentionally weakened through new groupings of teachers, depart-
mental loyalty can remain extremely powerful (Hargreaves & Macmillan,
1995; Siskin, 1997). As a result, in a typical comprehensive high school
the creation of a shared vision becomes extremely difficult (Siskin, 1997).
Therefore, in high school settings, we expect the same sorts of difficulties
to exist with the distributed leadership initiatives that require new groupings
of teachers and administrators to engage in collective sensemaking of their

redesigned work and attempt to practice leadership with an eye toward
achieving schoolwide objectives.
Furthermore, it is now conventional wisdom that time is a scarce commodity
in schools, but for educator workgroups to gel and begin to perform leadership
functions, time is a very necessary ingredient. Two important factors that
influence the availability of time for distributed leadership to take hold and
operate effectively are the amount of release time and length of school day as
negotiated under a collective bargaining agreement.
A massive work redesign like distributed leadership will inevitably be
impacted by organizational structures already in place in schools. Groups
of teachers and administrators need to be integrated together from different
grade levels or departments and a certain amount of time must be made
available to them to develop the internal mechanisms to practice leadership.
It might also take time for principals to trust the groups enough to grant them
autonomy. For these groups to contemplate implementation of its decisions,
make sense of and learn from that feedback, even more time is required. Thus
organizational structures are even antecedents to the core job characteristics.
As the discussion of departmental structures influencing identity demon-
strates, structure and culture are closely intertwined in the way we think
about and experience the school context. We turn our attention to school
culture next.
ORGANIZATIONAL AND PROFESSIONAL CULTURE
Historically, organizational culture in schools has been defined as a pattern

of artifacts, values and assumptions that bind a school into a coherent whole
(Firestone & Louis, 1999). It is the accumulated product of people working
together, learning and making sense of their world collectively over time.
Since the interpretive turn, this relatively narrow view of culture has been
expanded. Swidler (1986) suggests utilizing a “tool kit” approach to under-
standing the relationship between culture and action. Specifically, a cultural
tool kit contains an assortment of codes that are used eclectically to guide or
rationalize action. This view of culture helps to explain contradictory impulses
within a school culture, and the development and sustainability of subcultures
within a school. The tool kit metaphor also provides room for individual agency
to exist alongside a more or less consistent schoolwide culture.
Organizational culture is important in this distributed leadership model
because scholars view it as both the key to school reform and a major imped-
iment to it. Deal and Peterson (1999) believe that a good school culture rallies
stakeholders in the school around a vision, builds a sense of community,
and motivates teachers, administrators and parents to be more productive
and effective in the joint enterprise of education. On the other hand, Sarason
(1996) points out that certain regularities represent the culture of schooling
that resists and diffuses efforts to change activities. In either view, if this work
redesign moves the school into more “unsettled times” (Firestone & Louis,
1999, p. 300), which we would expect, the culture will likely become more
explicit and internally consistent.
One aspect of the school culture that is relevant to distributed leadership
initiatives is the professional culture among educators. More intense and
frequent joint work among educators strengthens professional culture in
that work group and schoolwide (Louis, Kruse, & Marks, 1995). Based on
survey and case research, Louis and her colleagues argue that professional
culture can be enhanced in schools if appropriate actions are taken. There is
evidence from many studies that administrators have a tremendous influence
on professional culture over time (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom,
2004). Cultural turnarounds may take several years, but they are possible
where administrators and teachers move beyond simplistic perspectives on

school improvement (Louis, 1994). One way to do this is to promote teacher
leadership and champion collective learning, (Louis, Marks, & Kruse, 1996;
Marks & Louis, 1999).
On the other extreme, we have seen hints in Louis and Miles’s (1990)
study of urban high schools that a professional culture can reinforce a sense
of dispiritedness or fragmentation in schools where teachers experience
eroding working conditions and failure over a long period of time. When
educators perceive declining resources and demographic change, it can
undermine a strong and cohesive sense of professionalism (Hargreaves,
1994). Additionally, unresolved differences among teachers and between
teachers and communities take their toll. Brouilette’s (1996) case study
of “Cottonwood District” documents how enduring divisions among well-
intentioned leaders, teachers, and parents created conditions that led to an
acrimonious fight over the opening of a new high school which, in turn,
reinforced divisions among teachers about fundamental issues, impeding
further effective change. Overall, the evidence of how schools overcome the
cultural residue of periods of decline and ineffectiveness is slim.
We are convinced that school and professional culture will play a pivotal
role in our model. The codes of professional conduct in a school will guide
those who shape a distributed leadership reform thus allowing culture to play
an antecedent role to the redesign effort. Of course, culture is essential in
the sensemaking process. Organizational culture can also enhance or detract
from the motivating potential of the design characteristics of a distributed
leadership initiative. Moreover, if the existing professional culture is strong
enough, it is more likely (a) to foster more rapid learning of how to perform
leadership functions effectively because a common language and under-
standing of how to interact is in place and (b) to capitalize on the strengths
and capacities of teachers across the building more quickly and efficiently
because talents and preferences are also already known.
RELATIONAL TRUST
Tschannen-Moran and Hoy (2000) deduce that trust involves the willingness
of individuals to rely upon others and to make oneself vulnerable to others in
that reliance. In their words, trust is “one party’s willingness to be vulnerable
to another party based on the confidence that the latter party is benevolent,
reliable, competent, honest, and open” (556; see also Tschannen-Moran,
2004). In the social science literature, trust is generally considered to be a
multilevel concept operating in interactive, systemic ways at the individual
and at the group or organizational levels (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2000;
Tschannen-Moran, 2004). It is developed initially and perhaps provisionally
in a social setting, and then can be strengthened, weakened, breached, lost,
and restored. Trust can apply to certain aspects of a personal or organizational
relationship and not to other aspects of the same relationship. Trust and
distrust may exist simultaneously in the same relationship.

Trust can be influenced by individual predispositions to trust or distrust,
histories of trust-related interactions, and disclosures of third parties (Kramer,
1999). It can be derived from social categories organizational roles persons
occupy (e.g., minister, doctor, attorney) and it can be influenced by the
authority and power associated with those categories and roles, particularly
those that are hierarchical. It can also be derived from the norms, formal rules
of conduct, and moral authority of the context in which persons interact (e.g.,
people in hospitals and churches are likely to be trustworthy) or from explicit
transactions (e.g., contracts) that define relationships and expectations for
those relationships (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Kramer, 1999).
According to Coleman (1988), trust is important because it lays the
foundation for collective activity, mutual assistance, and joint accountability.
In Tschannen-Moran’s (2004) view, “Trust allows a person to rest assured
in a situation where something that person cares about depends, at least in
part, on another person” (33). She continues that trust is important because
it serves, paradoxically, as both a “glue” and a “lubricant” in organizational
life. As glue, “trust binds organizational participants to one another” (16). As
lubricant, “trust greases the machinery of an organization. . . . [It] contributes
to great efficiency when people can have confidence in other people’s words
and deeds” (16).
Viewing trust as an antecedent to the model, one can easily imagine
that if levels of trust are high, the school-based developers of distributed
leadership probably would:
• Develop distributed leadership work that extends to a wider range of tasks

on a wider range of topics than if levels of trust are low (skill variety);
• Design work that is more challenging and “risky” but that may also be
more meaningful rather than mundane (task significance);
• Limit bureaucratic controls, relying more on the trust relationships as a

source of control, and extend greater discretion to those who are to perform
distributed leadership work (autonomy);
• Incorporate into the design of distributed leadership expectations and
processes of collaboration and open, bi-directional communication to
promote joint problem identification and problem solving, full and accurate
exchange of information, and honest and open assessment and feedback
not only of work but of performance, like the BASRC cycle of inquiry
(Copland, 2003a) (feedback).
With regard to motivation as a transition mechanism, high levels of trust

are likely to positively promote or amplify the enactment and experience and
therefore the motivational potential of design characteristics of distributed
leadership, whereas low levels of trust or distrust are likely to impede,
suppress, or negatively affect the enactment, experience and motivational

potential of those design characteristics. Moreover, if faculty perceive collec-
tively that trust rather than regulation is “lubricating” distributed leadership,
they should be more open to the reform.
Finally, the model suggests that how the transition mechanisms of
motivation, sensemaking, and learning operate to promote the performance
of distributed leadership may be moderated by the context in which those
leadership functions are to be performed. For example, in the performance
of distributed leadership functions, trust relationships among teachers and
between principals and their peers may be most important. In a school
where faculty felt they were falling out of a “trustzone,” a steering committee
of influential teachers lost its ability to sustain a unified vision for school
improvement (Maxcy & Nguyen, 2006).
MICROPOLITICS
Explicitly describing the ways in which distributed leadership has a political

perspective is crucial to understanding its development and operation
(Johnson, 2004). However, ten years ago Malen (1995) wrote that the field of
micropolitical research had “conceptual boundaries and distinctive features
[that] await definition” (159). In many ways, we are still waiting.
Micropolitics are relevant to schools because within these “micropolities”
three elements exist: (a) structures and processes that manage and regulate
behavior; (b) an unequal distribution of power among people; and (c) author-
itative allocations of resources (i.e., policy choices) that reflect decisions
made during conflicts over those resources and over ideology (Marshall &
Scribner, 1991).
Consider Iannacconne’s (1991) simple analogy of schools as polities,
which demonstrates the presence of all three elements. Law and custom
distinguish three strata in the school polity: administrators, teachers, and

students. As members of the two upper strata and as “citizens” who have
a voice in the direction of the polity, teachers and administrators fight for
power. However, they will likely keep their own disagreements quiet in
front of the lowest caste, a stratum of students who hold little power and
have no avenue to citizenship or voting rights in the school. In the school
polity, teachers traditionally ask and obtain protection from both the resident,
noncitizen underclass (e.g., students) and external demands from parents or
the district (Iannaccone, 1991).
As this illustration demonstrates, the micropolitical perspective offers
an insightful alternative to the rational/structural perspective, as it removes
the assumption that administrator control is legitimate (Ball, 1987; Maxcy &
Nguyen, 2006). With a micropolitical lens schools are viewed as “arenas of
struggle” (Ball, 1987, p. 19) where self-interest, power, conflict, alliance, and
ideology are all in play.

Like others (Hoyle, 1986; Marshall & Scribner, 1991), we believe that
separating the power structures, policies and rules on the one hand,
from the interactions among people on the other, is a helpful way to
conceptualize micropolitics. For purposes of elaborating our distributed
leadership model, we note that the both of these two elements, power struc-
tures and political interactions—particularly in the form of conflicts—can
influence the redesign of work and its transition into leadership function
performance.
For example, autonomy is one of the job characteristics that our model
suggests will motivate educators to perform leadership functions. When
teachers are asked to encroach into the administrative sphere, as they are
expected to do with distributed leadership reforms, the lines between the
instructional and administrative spheres will blur. “Conflict . . . seems sure
to accompany efforts at redefinition” of these deeply ingrained spheres
(Willower, 1991, p. 450). Will administrators be willing to let go of the
power that existing structures bestow upon them and allow opportunities for
workgroups that include teachers to make decisions, take risks, and perform
leadership functions for change? The answers to questions like this determine
the shape and scope of the distributed leadership work redesign and show
how a school’s micropolitics are antecedents to our model.
Similarly, micropolitics are certain to appear when educators must
manage boundaries within and between various internal groups in a school.
For example, as educators iron out the power dynamics within each group,
they will determine its stance on conflict. Will the group members tolerate
or silence dissent? Will they embrace or avoid conflict? On the one hand,
conflict has the potential to spur learning (Achinstein, 2002). On the other
hand, conflict could produce stress which, in turn, could decrease the motiva-
tional potential of the redesigned work. So, micropolitics can also impact the
transition mechanisms in our model.
Finally, existing sources of power will impact how the educators make
sense of the redesigned work and whether they engage in leadership activ-
ities. Storey (2004) recounts one school’s experience in which a principal
and science department chair had conflicting views about what distributed
leadership meant as a strategy for school improvement. The principal
wanted to show immediate student achievement results and hoped that
distributed leadership would expose poor teachers and force them out of the
building. The science department chair hoped to use distributed leadership
to build the capacity of struggling teachers. “When the conflicting stances
became evident, the leaders sought support from their different power
bases” (Storey, 2004, 262) and “buil[t] coalitions as they engaged in support-
building behaviour” (263). With an internal coalition of science teachers that
was presumably weaker than the principal’s external coalition, the science
department chairperson decided the conflict was unwinnable and he resigned
less than a year and a half after he started.
ORGANIZATIONAL STABILITY
Our final antecedent/moderator, the stability of the school organization, is

a superordinate consideration that influences the model directly and also
impacts each of the four organizational characteristics we just outlined (i.e.,
structures, culture, trust, and micropolitics). Our inclusion of this variable in
our model demonstrates one of the enduring paradoxes in the school reform
literature—that change requires stability.
Stability is a complex variable because it is tightly linked to our other
contextual factors and unfolds in a nonlinear fashion. It is complex because
it defies simple categorization. It is context dependent because it is influ-
enced by issues such as type of industry, age of the company, robustness
of the environmental niche, health of the organization, and so forth. And it
is nonlinear in the sense that both too little and too much stability is not
helpful.
Employing broad sociological and political lenses along with more
applied frames, educational scholars have explored the dynamics and the
importance of organizational and leadership stability in schools. For example,
it is nearly an article of faith in the practitioner literature that the short tenure
of many district CEOs, especially large city superintendents, contributes to
the educational problems in the nation in general and to the extended
periods of decline in many urban school systems. In a related vein, it is
often suggested that because of the complex dynamics of school organi-
zations (e.g., their vulnerability to environmental forces or the absence of
tight internal linkages), regularities at the schoolhouse and stability of formal
leaders in the principal’s office are desirable.
Empirical evidence on the stability in school is (1) generally derivative;

that is, it is not the prime element of interest in most studies, it surfaces in
the narrative of other variables (e.g., organizational effectiveness); (2) not
especially robust; and (3) in line with the theoretical models and research
evidence available more generally. Regarding staff, Rutter and his colleagues
(1979) conclude that stability among a school’s teachers is associated with
more effective education for urban youngsters. In a recent review of educa-
tional effectiveness, Murphy and Datnow (2003) found that “promoting staff
stability” (p. 267) was a key element in the principal’s toolbox to promote
organizational coherence, a condition, in turn, that is tightly connected to
school improvement.
At the school level, principal stability is also linked to more effective
schools. Obviously, instability in formal leadership, especially in the princi-
palship, often signals the demise of improvement efforts (Kilgore & Jones,
2003). Or, as Copland and his colleagues discovered in their study of the Bay
Area School Reform Collaborative, “of all the challenges involved in reform
work, schools point to leadership turnover as the most disturbing factor in
the support and encouragement of reform” (Copland, 2003b, p. 176).
More specifically, concerning distributed leadership, principal stability
is critical because “it is the principal who occupies the position to bring
teacher leadership to life” (Murphy & Datnow, 2003, p. 266), and that “the
robustness and viability of distributed leadership is dependent on the support
and direction of the principal” (Kilgore & Jones, 2003, p. 43). It is the principal
who in many ways, “must set the stage for teacher leadership and allow
teachers to seize the opportunity when they recognize the need” (Kahrs, 1996,
p. 27). The principal is in a key position to “set the climate that encourages
or stifles teachers’ attempts to enter the circle of leadership” (Blegen &
Kennedy, 2000, 4). It is the principal who must step to the forefront to address
the “issues that cause a reluctance among teachers to be leaders” (Bishop,
Tinley, & Borman, 1997, p. 77). The principal also “plays a key role in how
effectively the teacher leader functions” (Feiler, Heritage, & Gallimore, 2000,
p. 68). As Katzenmeyer and Moller (2001) conclude from their extensive
analysis, teacher leadership is not a chance organizational event. Where
teacher leadership thrives, administrators “make teacher leadership a priority
and take risks to provide teacher leaders what they need to succeed” (p. 85).
The message in the literature is unambiguous: “principals need to know how
to develop, support, and manage these new forms of leadership” (Smylie,
Conley, & Marks, 2002, p. 182). All of these conclusions from the liter-
ature demonstrate how the stability in the principal’s office can influence the
development and implementation of distributed leadership, primarily through
building supportive structures and climate, increasing trust and engaging in
productive micropolitics.
Finally, an assortment of researchers has concluded that “stability in
district leadership [is] linked to successful school reform” (Murphy & Datnow,
2003, p. 270; see Berends, Bodilly, & Kirby, 2003; Datnow & Castellano,
2003). These researchers also find that “where school leadership stability is
not on the district radar screen, district leaders are as likely to hinder school
improvement efforts as they are to enhance them” (Murphy & Datnow, 2003,
p. 271).
In short, our model suggests another paradox when it comes to
distributed leadership. Despite the explicit goal that distributed leadership
initiatives are meant to flatten hierarchies and empower teachers by having
them engage high-impact and enriched work, by virtue of their positional
and symbolic authority, principals still matter a great deal to these reforms.
Without stable, consistent leadership in school and district administration,
we hypothesize that a reform with as much work redesign as distributed
leadership will be incredibly fragile.
CONCLUSION
By reviving work redesign theory and retrofitting the Job Characteristics

Model, we have accomplished two noteworthy results. First, with the prolif-
eration of distributed leadership initiatives spurred by SAELPs and school
reform advocates (Neuman & Simmons, 2000), we provide scholars with a
familiar and relatively manageable theoretical framework that can explain its
success or failure. Furthermore, embedded within our model is an element
of change over time—researchers can use it to study the development and
implementation of distributed leadership. Second, we expand the original
JCM to overcome its well-documented deficits and to customize it to the
study of distributed leadership, a reform that has a decidedly collective
nature.
But despite taking a major step forward in the research of distributed
leadership as work redesign, we believe there are a number of tasks necessary
to gain a deeper and more thorough understanding of the phenomenon.
First, the varied ways with which the new elements (i.e., organizational
antecedent/moderators and transition mechanisms) work within the model
must be examined more thoroughly. All elements of our framework, but
especially the antecedent/moderators, need data-based exploration to solidify
their inclusion in our model. We believe that further refinement of this
model can occur as we gather and analyze more data from our field
research.
Most important for both research and practice of distributed leadership,
the connection between the multiple performance of leadership and school
improvement needs to be established clearly. While scholars who have
defined distributed leadership descriptively have been very careful in noting
that its presence does not necessarily suggest positive or negative outcomes
for schools (Spillane, 2006), many authors who use the term in a more
prescriptive sense see distributed leadership as a path to school improvement.

We tentatively include school improvement as the ultimate result of multiple
performance of leadership function because we believe that redefined and
redesigned work in schools can lead to motivated and better-equipped
educators with a broader view of their schools and that these educators,
in turn, will perform leadership functions that will both deepen and
lengthen reform efforts. Simultaneously, though, we recognize that not all
people in schools can or should be leaders or will wield their leadership
for the common good (Kellerman, 2004). Currently, there is very little
evidence that demonstrates a causal connection between multiple leadership
function performance and school improvement. We urge researchers to
investigate that proposed linkage and provide further explanation as to
why distributed leadership can end in positive results for schools and
students.
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Distributed Leadership as Work Redesign:

KAREN SEASHORE LOUIS

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

In this article, we revive work redesign theory, specifically

DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP AS WORK REDESIGN: RETROFITTING

The “buzz” surrounding the concept of distributed leadership has traveled

distributed leadership is a focus in many of the twenty-four states receiving

THE ORIGINAL JCM

Core Job Characteristics Psychological States Outcomes

Individual Skills and Experience

FIGURE 1 Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model (1980).

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE JOB

WORK REDESIGN IN SCHOOLS

An examination of research in schools that is framed by theories of work

Finally, we note that unlike a lot of the research conducted in factories

of motivation as the sole transition mechanism from redesigned work to

AN ELABORATED MODEL FOR THE STUDY

Individual — Knowledge, skills, growth-need, satisfaction with workplace

FIGURE 2 Distributed Leadership as Work Redesign.

context, we add multiple moderating/antecedent variables at the organiza-

of developing distributed leadership, from how they shape the formulation

DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP AND THE CORE JOB

increase these elements in jobs but also decrease them.

everyone associated with schools—principals, teachers, school staff

On the other hand, we must recognize that individual autonomy and

the individual autonomy that a teacher experiences. Several individuals can

School Reform Collaborative’s Cycle of Inquiry, is “conceived to promote

DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP PRACTICE

• providing and selling a vision,

have been empirically tested in the implementation of a social problem

which it sits (i.e., parents, business, taxpayers, etc.). In a school engaged in

mechanisms. How do these job characteristics translate into educators

When a job is high in motivating potential, people who work on the

The potency of work redesign to motivate employees, including teachers,

largely operating through “schemas” or “mental models” that individuals

function articulated by Heller and Firestone (1995), providing and selling a

We identify renewal of the overall enterprise as the underlying

Specifically, the adaptations made by high school teachers to longstanding

and learning from small errors (Kuwada, 1998).

An organization’s structures reflect its unique history including the decisions

direct consequences for organizational processes and outcomes. When a

tation, the formal hierarchical structure is still a crucial element to consider in

subject departments form the primary organizational unit of the high

In many schools, departments balkanize the faculty, that is they create