How Schools Build Leadership Teams That Actually Work Together
A three-year study of Swedish schools reveals that shared leadership requires more than structural changes—it demands deliberate cultivation of trust networks and dialogue practices over time. The findings offer a roadmap for school systems and other organizations struggling to distribute decision-making beyond top management.
Originaltitel: Relational infrastructure and distributed leadership: A longitudinal study of school system development
<p>Distributed leadership in schools has attracted substantial research attention, yet how the organizational conditions it requires actually develop over time remains poorly understood. This article addresses that question through a 3-year longitudinal study of school system development in a Swedish municipality, engaging principals, deputy principals, and middle leaders across an entire school system in sustained collective work. We introduce the concept of relational infrastructure—the trust networks, dialogue practices, and shared meaning-making processes that enable collaborative leadership to emerge and endure—and propose a four-phase process model showing how these conditions develop from individual experimentation to organizational culture. Relational infrastructure extends the educational infrastructure perspective by theorizing relational and cultural dimensions that existing frameworks identify but do not fully develop. The study contributes a processual account of distributed leadership development at system level, showing how relational infrastructure is built through deliberate developmental work within a stable formal architecture, how it deepens across phases, and how it can erode when the organizational conditions sustaining it are disrupted. These contributions offer school systems a language and a developmental logic for understanding and investing in the relational conditions that distributed leadership requires.</p>