A New Perspective for Understanding School Managers’ Roles

Background/Context: Increasingly, educational leadership research has stressed that leadership
is not solely embedded in formal roles but often emerges from relationships between individuals.
Senior management teams (SMTs) are an important expression of a formal management
structure based on the principle of distributed leadership. Such structures may require a
reconceptualization of school leadership and the role of the principal in such a way as to better
meet new challenges and enable principals to manage SMTs more effectively. Accordingly,
it is proposed that to improve effectiveness, principals engage in boundary activities, the
principals’ internal activities directed toward the SMT aimed at dealing with internal team
matters and the principals’ external activities directed toward external agents in the team’s
focal environment to acquire resources and protect the team.
Purpose/Objective: The present study attempts to advance a theoretical model of principals’
internal and external activities toward their SMTs. This study’s purpose is twofold: First,
the study tries to determine which of the internal and external activities principals engage in
more frequently and less frequently and to what extent. Second, the study attempts to determine
how these activities are related to the SMT effectiveness outcomes: in-role performance
and innovation. Taking on a distributive perspective to school leadership, our goal is to extend
our knowledge about the activities that might facilitate SMT effectiveness, by highlighting
the principal boundary activities as fundamental.
Research Design: Quantitative study.
Findings/Results: ANOVA analyses indicate significant mean differences between the principal’s
internal and external activities. Results from Structural Equation Model indicate that
internal activities were related to SMT performance, whereas external activities were related
to SMT innovation.
Conclusions/Recommendations: Principals who manage both the internal SMT dynamic by
promoting SMT identity and building team trust, while also promoting a common mission,
serve the role of coordinator between SMT members and constituencies external to the SMT,
enhancing SMT effectiveness. It may be, then, that studying new models of school leadership
and management, including the relationship of the principal and the SMT, may deepen our
understanding of the increasingly complex role of principals today.