My First Article Review

1. JOURNAL ARTICLE REVIEW
‘Improving Leadership In Higher Education Instituitons: A Distributed Perspective’
Source
Van Ameijde, Jitse D. J.; Nelson, Patrick C.; Billsberry, Jon; van Meurs and Nathalie, 2009,
‘Improving leadership in higher education instituitions: a distributed
perspective’, Higher Education, vol. 58 Issue 6, p763-779, 17p, viewed 19 April 2009,
EBSCOhost database Academic Search Premier, DOI: 10.1007/s10734-009-9224-y.
Overview
Distributed leadership challenges this view of leadership as a solely vertical process in which
an individual leader is seen as the main source of influence which shapes the emergence of
collective action, and instead focuses on the mechanisms through which diverse individuals
contribute to the process of leadership in shaping collective action. As such, it provides an
important complementary understanding of the subtleties of leadership in real organisational
settings. Thinking of distributed leadership is in a deep relation with quantum mechanics,
emergency theory and activity theory (Baloğlu, 2011). In this approach leadership is not series
of behaviors exhibited by a person, is seen as a pattern of relationships within the normative
in the organization (Harris, 2005). This article concentrates on how distributed patterns of
leadership manifest themselves in project teams within a Higher Education institution. The
authors’ main idea is that to gain an understanding of how patterns of distributed leadership
manifest themselves in project teams within a Higher Education institution, and to understand
whether successful project work is characterised by stronger levels of leadership distribution.
A description of the Methodology
From this article, the authors emphasis on both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of distributed
leadership, thus providing an account of the nature of distributed leadership in higher
education and the factors which were found to enhance and inhibit its occurrence and
effectiveness. The authors focus study at UK based university. The participants used
purposive sampling and by referral sampling methods. From this article, five individuals from
a range of different positions were selected and approached for participation in the research
project. The university’s staff consists of roughly 80% administrative employees and of about
20% academics. Middle and senior management is composed of about 60% male and 40%

2. female. Four of which had administrative positions and one which had an academic position.
Two of the participants were female and three male. All of the five individuals had an
organizational tenure of at least 2 years and had been involved in a range of projects.
The authors used a separate session in which they were asked to describe two projects
they had been involved in; one project they regarded as successful, and one project they
regarded as unsuccessful. The authors constructed causal maps together with the individual
for both the successful and the unsuccessful projects, focusing on the factors which caused the
projects to be successful or unsuccessful. At the end of these sessions five additional people
interviewed using a semi-structured interview technique to provide more data on the
leadership of these projects. 20 additional participants were interviewed, making 25 in total.
Besides that, the authors import the audio recorded into Decision Explorer. The
transcripts of both the causal mapping sessions and the interviews were then imported into
Nvivo7, a computer based program for qualitative data analysis. During this coding, the focus
was laid on the team being the unit of analysis. Therefore, no difference was made between
the different members of a project team, regardless of their formal status within the team.
Content analysis was used to identify recurrent themes, which were perceived to be factors
influencing distributed leadership. According to Smaling 1992, consensual inter-subjectivity
is the consensus that is reached between researchers on the interpretation of data, and is
regarded as a main tool in qualitative research to measure reliability. On the basis of a
randomly chosen transcript an interrater reliability of 87% was found, using the percentage
agreement method.
Results
The findings are presented in a model of distributed leadership which seeks to provide
an integrative account and a framework for further study. At the organizational level, the
authors identified several factors around external activities and processes. These factors
involved the way in which the team interacted with and related to important constituencies
outside of the team. These factors were found to influence important outcomes, which in turn
served as inputs for continuing distributed leadership at the team level. While at the team
level, the authors found several factors, which relate to the way the team itself operates. These
factors were divided into critical internal conditions and critical internal processes. By
comparing successful and unsuccessful projects, it became apparent that the factors at the
organizational and team levels were important in shaping the success or lack thereof of

3. projects. Although most of the factors seemed to play a role in all of the projects, the relative
importance and the specific configuration in which the factors interacted varied between the
projects. One aspect that seemed to particularly influence the configuration of the way the
different factors influenced project outcomes was the nature of the project as emergent or top-
down initiated.
From the perspective of organizational level, the authors had discussed, in each of the
projects, leadership was not solely confined to facilitating the internal processes of the project
teams, but had to deal with challenges which reached beyond the direct boundaries of the
projects. Involvement of and negotiation with external stakeholders, gathering and
disseminating important information regarding the projects, and facilitating an alignment
between the projects and the wider organisation context were regarded as vitally important in
determining the success of the various projects. The article also discussed about the critical
external processes. There are three main aspects that have been pointed in the article which
are tailoring message to the receiver, the feedback of progress and involving key people.
Moreover, the author indicate a few critical external conditions in their article. There are
support from decision makers, information gained through conducting external activities,
consisted of resources and consisted of externally acquired expertise.
Through the perspective of team level, for distributed leadership is the internal
functioning of the team. Several factors influencing distributed leadership at the team level
were identified by the authors. They were subdivided into critical internal conditions and
critical internal processes. Below, the authors will first describe the critical internal
conditions, followed by the critical internal processes. From the article, there are six critical
internal conditions were derived. They were include of the autonomy, a clearly defined goal, a
shared internal support, clearly defined responsibilities, key internal expertise and team size.
While for the critical internal processes, the authors have been identified five critical internal
processes which are information sharing, mutual performance monitoring, coordinating
activities, adaptive behaviours and inclusiveness. However, the authors explained that, in
contrast to the critical internal conditions, critical internal processes could not directly be
influenced by team design, but rather needed to be fostered and developed within the team.
In this article, the data support some of the previous findings from the fields of
distributed, shared, and team leadership. Pearce (2004), for instance, highlighted the
importance of expertise, the allocation of responsibilities, optimal team size, and a clearly

4. defined goal or vision as factors essential to the development and successful continuity of
shared leadership. Day et al. (2004) found that adaptability and mutual performance
monitoring were necessary for effective team leadership, a finding supported by the authors
study. Additionally, the opinion from the authors is that the concept of team orientation shows
strong resemblance with what they have termed inclusiveness, another aspect found to be
important for the development of distributed patterns of leadership. Burke et al. (2006)
described empowerment as an enhancing factor for successful teamwork, in line with their
finding that a level of autonomy is essential for a team to engage in effective distributed
leadership. Additionally, the authors notion of inclusiveness as important to distributed
leadership seems to be similar to Burke et al.’s concept of consideration. Besides supporting
these previous findings and grounding them in qualitative empirical data, the authors hope
that their study has contributed to an integration of these previous findings in a field which is
still characterized by theoretical and conceptual pluralism. The model of distributed
leadership as they propose it is by no means meant to be a final framework, but rather a
device to structure their understanding of and inquiry into the concept of distributed
leadership.
Evaluation
In this research, the authors adequately establish the significant of the research
questions. As to distributed leadership, it complements each other in the knowledge, skills, or
is created by bringing together the expertise focuses on multiple leadership structures. In this
sense, both the organizational level and team level are sharing a common point. However,
when the organization and team includes a share for the Higher Education Instituitions ,
distributed leadership includes the conceptually sharing with the integration concrete
structures such as cooperation and work together . From this point on, it can be said that
common point for these leadership models is to be the feeling of being part of a larger and
more powerful structure, to enhance and inhibit its occurrence and effectiveness. The data
collection and anlysis are appropriate from this research questions. Thus, the study’s
conclusions are also reasonable from the data collection and analysis. Moreover, there is no
ethical concern with this study. However, one important point the authors make is that they
are not really concerned on value of leadership in both organizational and team structure. In
today’s educational management practices, the effects of the positivist paradigm are
questioned by its antagonists (Turan 2004; Turan & Şişman 2004) and at the same time, this
questioning has been made for the paradigm of one person leadership. (Goleman, 2002;

5. Harris, 2004) According to Sergiovanni a moral society have to be managing with moral
leadership (Vulture-Altun, S.: 2003). This situation brings together on a common basis value-
based leadership behaviors and distributed leadership behaviors of instructors in leadership
practices. The results could have been more conclusive if the authors had studied deeply about
value-based leadership together with distributed leadership in Higher Educations Institutions.
A discussion of implications
From the data in this article, it became obvious that different team members were responsible
for conducting activities related to the wider organizational context, either because of their
specific expertise or because of their particular informal networks. This will make the
researcher understanding of boundary management as a means to integrate certain vital
expertise not available within the team, as well as its role as a mechanism for ensuring
continuous alignment between a team and the wider organizational context. Based on the
findings, the authors suggest that the network of participation in leadership is essentially a
boundary judgment which needs to be made based on the context of the situation. Also, the
researcher believe that such boundaries are essentially fluid, and can be extended or limited
depending on the present needs of the team or organization.
The researcher also believe that the principles of distributed leadership show promise
in overcoming some of these tensions and help Higher Education institutions deal more
effectively with the pressures of adapting to ever increasing rates of environmental change. In
practice, the researcher have seen this in a number of the authours cases where academic and
administrative staff have transcended the cultural frictions and successfully engaged in
initiatives where each complemented rather than opposed the other, even leading to successful
attempts to start linking in-house academic research to leadership and management practice
within the organisation. However, some of their cases also highlighted the fragility of
effective distributed leadership.
Conclusion
Distributed leadership could play a major role in the future of our knowledge-based society as
it combines the strengths of various individuals and balances their weaknesses. It might well
be that in a world where work is increasingly team-based and no single person can hold all the
relevant knowledge to make the right decisions, there is a growing belief that the competitive

6. advantage of organizations will increasingly depend on their ability to integrate the widely
dispersed knowledge and skills of their entire workforce in the process of leadership.
References
Baloğlu N. (2011). Distributor leadership: the management of the school to be considered in
the process of restructuring a leadership approach. Ahi University Faculty of
Education Journal, 12 (3), 127-148.
Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Klein, C., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., & Halpin, M. (2006). What
type of leadership behaviors are functional in teams? A meta-analysis. The Leadership
Quarterly, 17, 288– 307. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.02.007.
Day, D. V., Gronn, P., & Salas, E. (2004). Leadership capacity in teams. The Leadership
Quarterly, 15, 857– 880. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2004.09.001.
Goleman, D. (2002). The new leaders: Transforming the art of leadership into the science of
results. London: Little, Brown.
Harris, A. (2004). Distributed leadership: Leading or misleading. Educational Management
and Administration, 32 (1), 11–24.
Harris, A. (2005). Distributed leadership. In B. Davies (Ed.), The essentials of school
leadership (pp. 160–172) Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press/ Paul Chapman Publishing.
Pearce, C. L. (2004). The future of leadership: Combining vertical and shared leadership to
transform knowledge work. Academy of Management Executive, 19, 47–57
Smaling, A. (1992). Varieties of methodological intersubjectivity: Relations with qualitative
and quantitative research and with objectivity. Quality & Quantity, 26, 169–180.
doi:10.1007/BF02273552.
Turan, S. and fat, M. (2004). The main trends in the world regarding training of educational
administrators and some conclusions can be drawn for the turkey. Turkish Educational
Sciences, 2 (1), 13 - 25
Vulture-Altun, S. (2003). Educational administration and values. Values Education Journal, 1
(1), 7-18.

7. advantage of organizations will increasingly depend on their ability to integrate the widely
dispersed knowledge and skills of their entire workforce in the process of leadership.
References
Baloğlu N. (2011). Distributor leadership: the management of the school to be considered in
the process of restructuring a leadership approach. Ahi University Faculty of
Education Journal, 12 (3), 127-148.
Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Klein, C., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., & Halpin, M. (2006). What
type of leadership behaviors are functional in teams? A meta-analysis. The Leadership
Quarterly, 17, 288– 307. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.02.007.
Day, D. V., Gronn, P., & Salas, E. (2004). Leadership capacity in teams. The Leadership
Quarterly, 15, 857– 880. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2004.09.001.
Goleman, D. (2002). The new leaders: Transforming the art of leadership into the science of
results. London: Little, Brown.
Harris, A. (2004). Distributed leadership: Leading or misleading. Educational Management
and Administration, 32 (1), 11–24.
Harris, A. (2005). Distributed leadership. In B. Davies (Ed.), The essentials of school
leadership (pp. 160–172) Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press/ Paul Chapman Publishing.
Pearce, C. L. (2004). The future of leadership: Combining vertical and shared leadership to
transform knowledge work. Academy of Management Executive, 19, 47–57
Smaling, A. (1992). Varieties of methodological intersubjectivity: Relations with qualitative
and quantitative research and with objectivity. Quality & Quantity, 26, 169–180.
doi:10.1007/BF02273552.
Turan, S. and fat, M. (2004). The main trends in the world regarding training of educational
administrators and some conclusions can be drawn for the turkey. Turkish Educational
Sciences, 2 (1), 13 - 25
Vulture-Altun, S. (2003). Educational administration and values. Values Education Journal, 1
(1), 7-18.