Teachers’ perception of distributed leadership in Hong Kong primary schools

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the study is to examine Hong Kong teachers’ perceptions of distributed leadership. Data were collected from six primary schools with a total of 155 teachers responding to a self-developed survey. Descriptive, reliability, and MANOVA data analyses were done with the application of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) programme. Using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), 14 components were identified, including: (1) school organisation, (2) school vision, (3) school culture, (4) instructional planning, (5) improvement of learning and teaching, (6) teacher leadership, (7) principal leadership, (8) output effectiveness, (9) quality effectiveness, (10) change effectiveness, (11) organisation and planning effectiveness, (12) interpersonal relationship effectiveness, (13) value effectiveness, and (14) overall effectiveness. Inter-correlations were found among the identified components. Significant differences were found between teachers with different roles with the highest involvement and dimensions of school organisation, teacher leadership and interpersonal relationship effectiveness. Meanwhile, significant differences were revealed between teachers’ roles in the highest positions and dimensions of improvement of learning and teaching, as well as principal leadership. Such findings suggest that teachers’ perceptions of distributed leadership were related to teachers’ roles, including delegated responsibilities and degree of role participation in the schools. Implications for practice and research are discussed at the end of the paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Distributed leadership
• primary schools
• teacher perceptions
• teacher participation
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

The study is based on the research project 'A study of teams as agencies of distributing curriculum leadership practices in Hong Kong primary schools' as led by by Prof. Edmond Law (Principal Investigator) and his team members, Prof. John Chi-kin Lee, Dr. Xian-han Huang, Prof. James P. Spillane, and Dr. Zhonghua Zhang.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sally Wai-Yan Wan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8389-6513

Additional information

Funding

This research project is sponsored by the General Research Fund (GRF), Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee, Hong Kong (Ref.: 18403314).