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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how school principals’ leadership competence is enhanced by participation in municipal school district leader teams in the Norwegian context.

The study investigated a field sample of 854 school principals working in 252 municipal school leader teams. Hypotheses were developed and tested by using multiple regressions and structural equation modeling; whereas individual- and group-level effects were tested using a hierarchical linear modeling approach. Moderator analyses where undertaken.

The results indicate that a supportive group climate in school leader teams is the strongest predictor of the principals’ learning outcomes. Moreover, trust to the superintendent and having a competent municipal school owner apparatus also predicted this form of professional development. Moderator analysis provides supplementary insights by showing that the positive effect of a trusting relationship to superintendents is contingent of a competent school owner.

The study reinforces the crucial importance of school superintendents creating a supportive and risk-free learning climate within their team of school leaders. The study underscores the importance of a competent school owner in Norwegian municipalities and the study places emphasis on a trusting relationship between school principals and their immediate superintendent.

The study highlights the importance that school district administrators develop municipal school leader teams toward effective learning system through internal competence development and a supportive group climate.

The study provides empirical evidence regarding the complex dynamics involved in the professional development of school principals in district leadership teams.

This purpose of this article is to contribute to the research on the role of individual and group-level autonomy and absorptive capacity for inter-organizational knowledge transfer.

The study investigated a field sample of 274 individual participants in 82 groups who were taking part in a large-scale benchmarking project in the Norwegian public sector. Hypotheses were developed and tested by using multiple regression, structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear modeling and included an empirical test of moderator effects.

The findings suggest that individual and group autonomy, along with individual experiences of absorptive capacity, supports complementarily inter-organizational knowledge transfer.

The study reinforces the idea that individual and group autonomy are enabling conditions for knowledge transfer from project settings to parent organizations. Absorptive capacity, in line with more recent theorizing, is conceived of and measured as an organizational meta-routine, and we recommend replication of this study in various multi-level settings using longitudinal designs.

The study encourages managers to focus on distributing powers to individual facilitation and boundary-spanning roles and on creating cross-functional venues that promote the sharing of knowledge across different organizational units. The study also recommends that practitioners pay attention to the prominent role of autonomy at both the individual and group levels to support the dissemination of knowledge across boundaries.

The study provides empirical evidence regarding the simultaneous role of individual autonomy, group autonomy and absorptive capacity that together provide the explanatory power required for knowledge transfer in inter-organizational settings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between school leadership practices and teacher empowerment in the Finnish policy culture. Specifically, moral leadership and distributed leadership enacted by school principals are tested in a simultaneous design as predictor to two distinct yet related aspects of teachers’ sense of empowerment, respectively, in their work domain and their classroom domain.

The study investigated a field sample of 246 individual teachers from ten Finnish primary schools. Hypotheses were developed and tested by structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that moral leadership exerted by school principals support teachers’ sense of empowerment both in work domain and classroom domain. Distributed leadership, in the meaning of sharing instructional leadership tasks with teachers, supported work domain empowerment but did not predict classroom domain teacher empowerment. Taken together, the model show the value of school principals facilitating teachers in decision-making processes paired with showing a strong moral basis in their relationship with teachers.

The study reinforces the importance of moral leadership and distributed leadership as conjoint drivers for teachers’ sense of empowerment. It would be highly valuable to replicate this study in various multi-level settings.

The findings recommend school leaders to put emphasis on facilitative, ethical, and authentic practices in immediate relationships with their teachers.

The study provides empirical evidence regarding the partial relationships between principal leadership practices and teacher empowerment.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to investigate Etienne Wenger's theory of social learning in a community of practice by modeling two simultaneous aspects of teachers’ collaborative learning: their engagement in close-knit internal groupings and engagement with colleagues that work externally to the core group. These two learning processes are related to two social-cognitive outcomes: teachers’ organizational commitment and their sense of impact.

The study investigated a field sample of 246 individual teachers from ten Finnish primary schools. Hypotheses were developed and tested by using multiple regression and structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that local engagement supports teachers’ organizational commitment. However, this form of collaborative learning behavior did not support their sense of impact. Moreover, external engagement with trusted colleagues supported sense of impact but not organizational commitment.

The study reinforces the importance of teachers’ engagement in communities of practice. Specifically, the results suggest two specific social-cognitive outcomes related to two different learning processes situated in teachers’ community of practice. It would be highly valuable to replicate this study in various multi-level settings.

The study highlights teachers’ engagement in communities of practice as a source of their motivational basis and their commitment. Findings recommend school leaders to facilitate internal and external learning communities.

The study provides empirical evidence regarding the partial relationships between teachers’ local and external learning engagement and the social-cognitive outcomes of these forms of learning behaviors.