Deputy heads—leadership and power in change?

Abstract

Much current research emphasizes the importance of leadership as an interactive activity in leading school change and improvement. In the Norwegian context, there is growing interest in redesigning the historical hierarchical leadership structure, with a single school leader at the top to a more distributed leadership model that includes several middle leader levels, including deputy heads. While research has been conducted on middle leaders and distributed leadership as an interactive activity, few empirical studies to date have investigated how changing leadership structures affect the relation between leadership and power and how this situation can influence deputy heads’ room for maneuvering. In this article we use data from a Norwegian case to investigate deputy heads’ increased responsibility toward leading school change and improvement and how these changes influence questions of power. The analysis indicates that different forms of power influence deputy heads’ room for maneuvering.