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The purpose of this paper is to explore a broader understanding of the role of Cypriot school principals’ personal identities, through a values system perspective, when exercising their leadership.

A multicase study methodology was followed with five school principals, representing five different leadership styles. In each case, an in-depth investigation of the school principal’s personal identity was undertaken. School principals’ personal values were explored during interviews, staff meetings and daily activities observations, as well as through the use of the think-aloud protocol method. This study utilized the Schwartz Theory of Basic Human Values, as well as the Pashiardis–Brauckmann Holistic Leadership Framework, as the guiding theoretical framework.

School principals’ personal identities in Cyprus seem to influence, to some extent, their daily leadership practice. However, particular factors associated with the context in which they live (social identity) and work (professional identity), seemed to be affecting the personal values embedded throughout their personal identities.

Five school principals are not enough to make generalizations on the relationships between leadership styles and values. However, through this paper, the authors sought to provide examples on how school principals’ personal identities influence their leadership practice.

The findings highlight the important role and attention to school principals’ personal identities, beyond the core management and leadership courses. The findings also shed light on the importance of looking more closely at contextual elements “outside” and “inside” the school and to what extent these could influence school principals’ personal identities.

This paper offers insights into school principals’ personal identities, through a values system perspective, and how these personal identities influence their leadership practice.

This paper aims to contribute to the literature and practice on beginning principal socialization by identifying the features of post‐industrial work that create a more complex work environment for the practice and learning of the principalship in the USA.

Based on recent literature on the changing nature of work, the paper applies those features of complexity to components of beginning principal socialization.

The nature of work in post‐industrial society and the changes in education, including a knowledge society, technology, demographic changes, and public accountability increase the complexity for US school principals. These features provide an important conceptual and normative basis for understanding and changing the content, sources, methods, and outcomes of beginning principal socialization.

The paper contributes a set of conceptual and normative features that strengthens the understanding of how beginning principals learn the role.

While school reform literature calls attention to incentives for teachers, little research or policy making has focused on school administrators′ incentives. Career incentives perceived by a sample of elementary school principals and the influence of career background on those incentives are examined. It was found, using both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, that principals perceive their career as having economic, ancillary and task‐related rewards. However, principals varied in the kinds of incentives they preferred and the nature of their future goals. Principals who have moved among several school districts in their administrative careers are more likely to be satisfied and to emphasise incentives, such as contact with school constituencies, which come from staying in the principalship. In contrast, principals who have remained in the same district throughout their administrative careers are more likely to prefer those incentives which advancement to central office can offer.

School leadership is found important for school development and student learning. Consequently, the interest in professional leadership education for principals has increased. In Sweden, professional leadership education for novice principals was made mandatory in 2010. Moreover, enhanced focus on leadership for teaching and learning in terms of ‘pedagogical leadership’ is highly topical. This study aims to deepen our knowledge of novice principals’ experiences of pedagogical leadership practices and relate these to their paths toward principalship. The study follows a qualitative and situated design and adopts a practice-based approach. Observations were conducted in the educational and workplace practices of novice principals in Sweden and interviews were conducted with principals and teachers. Using a conceptual framework of Wenger (1998), the analyses show that principals experience challenges concerning pedagogical leadership if their competence and experience are not aligned with practice and context. This mismatch seems to impair their pedagogical leadership practice. In addition, a lack of leadership experience obstructs their learning in the professional leadership education for principals.

At a time when secondary vocational education is implementing competence‐based education (CBE) on a large scale, to adapt to the needs of students and of the labour market in a modern society, many vocational schools have recognised that interdisciplinary teacher teams are an important condition for this implementation. In order to provide students with the right competences for the labour market, different subject teachers should work and learn together and, by doing so, should be able to develop changes and improvements to ensure the effective implementation of CBE. In spite of the appeal of forming teacher teams in vocational education, studies on this subject show that teams in educational settings are not easily implemented. This paper aims to address this issue.

In this study, 28 managers from a Vocational Education and Training (VET) college in The Netherlands were interviewed in order to find factors that are related to effective team functioning. The authors choose to rely on a qualitative approach, because there has hardly been any empirical validation of factors that are related to effective team functioning in a vocational education context. In order to determine what factors influence team effectiveness, the results from the interviews have been related to what is known about team effectiveness from the literature.

By relating the results from the interviews to what is known about team effectiveness from the literature, a framework for future research on team effectiveness in schools is provided. In line with the organisational and psychological literature on team effectiveness, the managers distinguished several aspects in their definition of team effectiveness. Moreover, the findings of the study highlight the importance of the development of task interdependence, transformational leadership, and group efficacy for producing effective teams in education.

Although teams and team functioning have been the focus of researchers from different disciplines and have been studied from different perspectives, studies on the conditions that support or limit the successful implementation of teacher teams in vocational education are still scarce. The results of this study are expected to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanism that underlies the ability of teacher teams in vocational education to function effectively.

Examines leadership and school restructuring. Drawing upon postmodern/poststructural theory, argues that a new conception of educational leadership is required as reformers contemplate educational reconfiguration. Argues that the metaphorical notion of leadership as design is appropriate and valuable as reformers seek to consider plans to restructure schools. Traces the likely practical bearings of leadership as design upon the roles, rules, relationships, and results attached to present‐day school restructuring efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the current conversation on and research into the potential use of technology as a means of transforming mentoring processes and those engaged in them. The authors examine the manner in which technology is being integrated into mentoring endeavors and the advantages and disadvantages of this tool, arguing that the particular attributes of e-mentoring make it an ideal platform for enhancing mentoring processes and outcomes through the use of new mentoring perspectives. They describe a specific mentoring perspective that could be adopted as a means of critically examining some of the opportunities and challenges of using technology as a tool for transformational mentoring, with an emphasis on mentoring in educational environments.

This conceptual paper uses a constructionist perspective to mentoring as a lens to examine how technology influences the mentoring process and investigates the implications of transformational e-mentoring for educational professionals.

The paper contends that e-mentoring may extend mentoring's horizons to include increasingly broad and diverse constellations of mentors for protégés. With proper guidance, the relationships made possible through e-mentoring can fulfill many mentoring functions and transform both mentors and protégés as they learn from one other.

Other than descriptions of mentoring programs that use technological tools, very little research on the outcomes of e-mentoring is available. The paper calls for a greater focus on the outcomes of e-mentoring in future research.

The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of e-mentoring, presents recommendations for using new technologies to enhance mentoring programs in education and argues for the need to reconsider the purposes and structures of such programs.

The paper lays the groundwork for a better understanding of technology's role in mentoring in today's complex, rapidly changing knowledge society.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the socialisation and leader identity development of school leaders in Southern African countries.

The study utilised a survey of qualitative data where data collection primarily involved in-depth interviews with school principals and deputy principals of both primary and secondary schools.

Findings revealed that early socialisation to leadership transpired during childhood and early schooling at which points in time the characteristics and values of leadership integral to the participants’ leadership practice were acquired. Initial teacher training was found to be significant in introducing principalship role conception. Leader identity was also found to develop outside the context of school through pre-socialising agents long before the teaching and leading roles are assumed.

The study presents an overview of the findings from four countries in Southern Africa, providing a complex process with overlapping stages of career socialisation. Existing research puts emphasis on formal leadership preparation as a significant part of socialisation – this study suggests alternatives for poorly resourced countries. Significantly, the paper improves our understanding that school leader identity is both internal and external to the school environment.

The purpose of the article is to examine knowledge about successful principalship and discuss the methodology that has emerged throughout the history of the International Successful School Principals Project (ISSPP) and their implications for future progress.

Historical analysis is used as a strategy for establishing the background, the expansion and the progress of ISSPP as a long-standing international research network and to discuss the development of three research strands and methodological variations over time. The analysis provides a basis for pointing at some areas that need more attention in the future.

The findings suggest multiple images of the meaning of key concepts in the project and multiple theoretical and methodological orientations. There is a need to pay more attention to methodologies to make the successful cases more comparable and also to clarify the underlying assumptions of the different approaches.

Successful school principalship is a complex phenomenon. Therefore, future studies of successful schools and leadership would benefit from the use of knowledge that draws on sociology, cultural studies and politics.

The aim of the paper is to argue that principal preparation programs should help candidates: recognize the political role of the school principal; develop political skills (including the ability to strategically appropriate policy); and understand that the political approach of the principal influences teaching, learning, relationships, governance, and reform efforts. In addition, the paper reports findings of the analysis of Ontario's Principal Qualification Program guidelines to determine if they require principal preparation programs to develop aspiring school leaders’ political skills.

The paper reviews theoretical arguments and empirical studies from the fields of school micropolitics, business, educational leadership, and critical policy studies to establish five political skills principals require. The authors then conducted a content analysis of Ontario's Principal Qualification Program guidelines to determine if they require principal preparation programs to develop aspiring leaders’ political skills.

Ontario's Principal Qualification Program guidelines do not explicitly direct principal preparation programs to help candidates develop political skills. However, the guidelines recognize that principals pursue political goals and work in political environments, and they offer opportunities for appropriating the guidelines in ways that promote the development of principal candidates’ political skills.

The paper is the first to analyze Ontario's Principal Qualification Program guidelines to determine if they require principal preparation programs to develop aspiring leaders’ political skills. It also identifies policy appropriation as a political skill that should be developed in principal preparation programs and provides a model of how principal preparation policies themselves may be appropriated to support a focus on developing aspiring principals’ political skills.