Leadership as relational work: risks and opportunities

Abstract

Although fostering trust has been given more emphasis in recent research on school leadership, less research sheds light on the tensions between power and trust and how collective interactions related to leadership evolve in school settings. This paper addresses leadership as relational work, traced in interactions between a principal and a group of teachers operating within the context of a school-improvement project in a Norwegian upper secondary school. The analysis explores how the participants position themselves and others through negotiations in meetings while the participants discuss the conditions of the project. The findings show how leadership positions and power relations are constituted, challenged and changed in interaction amongst the participants over time. Thus, this study provides insight into leadership as an interactive process and the dynamics of power and trust in developing leadership actions. The main argument is that risks and opportunities are significant parts of leadership work, and that relational work affects the ever-changing status of the division of authority.

Acknowledgements

This work is financially supported by the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo. We thank the teachers and the principal at Fagerbakken upper secondary school who kindly allowed us to observe their interactions and activities. We also thank our colleagues at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, members of our research groups and participants, and invited scholars of the Norwegian Graduate School of Education (NATED) for their support, advice and feedback on earlier drafts of this work. Finally, many thanks to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and valuable comments.

Notes

1. In the Norwegian national curriculum document, key competencies are framed as five basic skills: writing, reading, expressing oneself orally, using digital tools, and calculating. These competencies all correspond with how the OECD programme ‘Definition and Selection of Competencies’ (DeSeCo) has developed a response to educational challenges.

2. In the excerpts, we meet the school principal, Hilde, the project coordinator, Tora and six of the teachers in the writing group, represented by the voices of Martin, Liv, Ragnhild, Cecilie, Edith and Ben. All the names are pseudonyms.