1.4 Theories of educational management  (Page 9/29)

(Bush, 2003, p. 65-67).

Participative leadership

Because policy is determined within a participative framework, the principal is expected to adoptparticipative leadership strategies. Heroic models of leadership are inappropriate when influence and power are widely distributedwithin the institution.“The collegial leader is at most a“first among equals”in an academic organisation supposedly run by professional experts . . . the collegial leader is not so much astar standing alone as the developer of consensus among the professionals who must share the burden of the decision.”(Baldridge et al, 1978, p. 45)

While transformational leadership is consistent with the collegial model, in that it assumes thatleaders and staff have shared values and common interests (Bush, 2003, p. 76), the leadership model most relevant to collegiality is“participative leadership,”which“assumes that the decision-making processes of the group ought to be the central focus of the group”(Leithwood et al, 1999, p. 12). This is a normative model, underpinned by three criteria (Leithwood et al, 1999):

• Participation will increase school effectiveness.
• Participation is justified by democratic principles.
• Leadership is potentially available to any legitimate stakeholder. (p. 12)

Sergiovanni (1984) claims that a participative approach succeeds in“bonding”staff together and in easing the pressures on school principals.“The burdens of leadership will be less if leadership functions and roles are shared and if theconcept of leadership density were to emerge as a viable replacement for principal leadership”(p. 13).

Limitations of collegial models

Collegial models have been popular in the academic and official literature on educational Collegial modelshave been popular in the academic and official literature on educational management since the 1980s. However, their criticspoint to a number of limitations:

• Collegial models are so strongly normative that they tend to obscure rather than portray reality. Precepts about the mostappropriate ways of managing educational institutions mingle with descriptions of behaviour. While collegiality is increasinglyadvocated, the evidence of its presence in schools and colleges tends to be sketchy and incomplete.“The collegial literature often confuses descriptive and normative enterprises . . . The collegialidea of round table decision making does not accurately reflect the actual processes in most institutions”(Baldridge et al, 1978, p. 33).

2.Collegial approaches to decision-making tend to be slow and cumbersome. When policy proposals require theapproval of a series of committees, the process is often tortuous and time consuming. Participants may have to endure many lengthymeetings before issues are resolved. This requires patience and a considerable investment of time. Several English primary schoolheads interviewed by Webb and Vulliamy (1996) refer to the time-consuming nature of meetings where“the discussion phase seemed to go on and on”(p. 445) and“I felt we weren’t getting anywhere”(p. 446).