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The purpose of this paper is to investigate important determinants of the culture of collective leadership in academic organizations. The present school improvement framework of Dubai School Inspection Board (DSIB) does not include cultural factors such as collective leadership, which is, according to many researchers, a leading factor of the operational efficiency and sustainable growth. The research objective was to identify the set of conditions that extend support to the development of collective leadership culture in the school work environment. In order to achieve research objectives, a sample of 271 employees from 12 underperforming private schools in Dubai was selected to examine the degree of the presence of visible practices promoting the culture of collective leadership. The past literature was explored to identify three manifest variables as determinants of the culture of collective leadership in the organization. The descriptive research design was adopted, and factor loadings on three manifest variables were examined through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to validate the scale, and later the model hypotheses were tested using the linear regression model. The study has revealed that shared vision, employee’s commitment to achieving the organizational goal, and collaboration are key determinants, whereas staff commitment is the most important determinant of collective leadership. Generalization of the findings is one of the main concerns due to small sample size, which can be improved in future similar studies by running the model on the larger sample size. Indeed, this study is one of the few that provides a quantitative approach to the measurement of collective leadership in schools, and its findings can be a source of guideline for institutions in higher education and non-academic organizations as well.

The descriptive research design was adopted to explain the the characteristics of the population with respect to variables used in the model. The underlying variables were explored through the past literature; therefore, EFA was also undertaken to validate the relationship between scale items and manifest independent variables of the hypothesized construct. The testing of hypothesis makes this research “confirmatory” that allows making inference about the parameters of the multiple regression models in this empirical model.

The concept of collective leadership is explaining the wider role of leadership function in an organization. It is one of the cultural aspects that can be seen through everyday practices in any educational institution. These practices include shared vision among employees, commitment to achieving the common goal, and collaboration and teamwork. The results show that staff commitment is the most important determinant of collective leadership. The understanding of a cultural aspect of collective leadership is necessary to deal with the problems of nonperforming educational organizations. It is important that school leaders must think beyond the current DSIB model and include elements of collective leadership in their strategic plans. This will enable them to achieve sustainable students and organizational achievements. Employees’ clarity on the objectives, trust and collaboration are prerequisite of such culture.

Generalization is one of the main concerns in this study. The larger sample size can help overcome this problem. The sample size in the current study was also gathered without stratification of the population. Schools can be classified with respect to gender, ethnicity, curriculum and social status. These factors were controlled in this study but can produce different results if included for the analysis. Data collection can be expanded to the entire country, Middle East and Asian region for further generalized interpretation. This will also open the scope to the cross-cultural analysis on the subject. Moreover, the mediating or moderating role of many other variables needs to be involved in the model for more accurate findings, such as curriculum, economic status of students, employees nationality and qualification, leadership experience and school budgetary volume are considered important factors which may affect school performance. A similar study can be conducted for the entire country covering all states.

The culture of collective leadership is not a sole cultural factor that creates success for the institution. When an organization achieves maturity in the collective leadership, employees set up goals in their own work in alignment to the overall organizational objectives. These goals will act as challenges, and with the motivated employees will take up these challenges and find new and improved ways to address the problems. This will provoke the creative thinking among employees. They will start realizing the importance of the critical knowledge in the work. Ultimately, when the organization develops a system to identify, store and make use of such knowledge, it will become learning organization, which is ready to meet future challenges.

This study will help organizations in other sector and industry as well, especially in service industry including financial institutions, higher education, etc. This will also provide guidelines to the education ministries across the region and beyond.

This is a new contribution in the field of HRM or workplace practices. It describes the factors determining the culture of collective leadership that in return creates success for the organization. This paper was never published before.

This paper provides an example of how organization theory can be linked with other literatures in a complementary and productive manner. Establishing a bridge between the organization theory and learning environment literatures, the authors seek to provide an example of how such literature‐bridging can enrich our understanding of the school‐classroom relationship.

After providing a set of working criteria with which to assess the developmental maturity of a field, this paper provides a general review of the learning environments literature. This is followed by an examination of an important yet under‐explored relationship in this literature: the school‐classroom relationship. Using concepts from organizational theory, the authors seek to establish the utility these concepts have for understanding the relationship that exists between classroom‐ and school‐level learning environments.

Given the importance of organization theory to our understanding of educational organizations and the increased absence of a substantive organizational perspective from our dialogue, there is a need to build and/or re‐establish bridges between organization theory and other lines of inquiry in education. Teaching and learning occur in an organizational context. Thus it is important that this context be considered by educational researchers. The time has also come to aggressively link the study of learning environments with literatures such as organization theory.

This paper provides an example of how literature‐bridging can be used to encourage and enrich dialogue between separate yet complementary lines of inquiry. It also sheds light on the relationship shared between the classroom and larger school.

The purpose of this study is to examine the applicability of Watkins and Marsick’s model of learning organization in the school context and explore the relationship between the learning dimensions and perceived organizational outcomes.

Using the instrument, Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ), the study collected data from 322 teachers and professional staff in K-12 schools. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling provide validity evidence for using the DLOQ in schools.

The study results indicate the learning organization is a multidimensional concept and the quality of the school as a learning organization is related to improved organizational performance as perceived by school personnel.

The study measured perceived organizational outcomes using a sample in an urban school district. Future research is encouraged to expand the study sample and to collect actual performance data to strengthen the findings.

The study provides reliability and validity evidence for an instrument that school leaders and practitioners can use to assist their evaluation of the school’s capacity as a learning organization to leverage improvement in school performance.

The study emphasizes an integrative approach in evaluating schools as learning organizations (SLOs) and extends the evidence base for the DLOQ studies. It offers empirical support for the significance of developing SLOs.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how leaders within a school district system understand their own and others' leadership positions from the perspectives of systems thinking and systems thinking skills.

The findings are based on interviews with superintendents, area managers (deputy superintendents), principals and first teachers in Sweden. Sets of systems thinking skills guide the analysis, specifically how various leadership positions are related (their structure and relationships), how leaders understand themselves in relation to the whole and the parts (mindset), what they think about how the organization is organized (content) and how they relate to the organization's history and future (behavior).

Leaders at all levels in the school organization have regular communications, but a wider systems thinking perspective is underdeveloped. The systems are hierarchical, with each level taking responsibility for its subsystem to such a high extent that it does not use or learn from other levels. We also found that change in the investigated schools is subtle, and in the schools, it did not seem important to understand change over time or the nature of important leverage points; the organizations' histories and futures were emphasized less than current issues and relations.

Increased knowledge on systems thinking skills can provide insights as to whether mindsets, content, structure and behavior are supporting each other or not. These perspectives can help actors on all levels to learn together.

In addition to the study outcomes, this paper offers a unique approach for studying the leadership positions of the governance chain and their impact on an organization's work and results. It obtains a broader picture of school districts' systems when various members of the governing chain express how they understand their organizations, in relation to systems thinking.

Examines the implications of institutional theory in the study of instructional leadership within the school organization. Outlines the implementation of this theory with the school, at the boundary between the school and the environment and also the organization of the institutional environment to which schools respond. Claims that theory enhances the administration of the school by the adoption of structures embodying cultural rules, and that it helps teachers to precipitate work‐related activity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships among governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations and the organization and management of instruction in US public education, with the aim of raising issues for cross-national research among countries in which the involvement of non-governmental organizations is increasing.

The paper is structured in four parts: an historical analysis of the architecture and dynamics of US public education; an analysis of contemporary reform efforts seeking to improve quality and reduce inequities; an analysis of ways that legacy and reform dynamics manifest in two US public school districts; and a discussion of considerations for cross-national research.

In US public education, dependence on non-governmental organizations for instructional resources and services is anchored in deeply institutionalized social, political and economic values dating to the country’s founding and that continue to function as constraints on educational reform, such that new solutions always emerge in-and-from the same problematic conditions that they seek to redress. The consequence is that reform takes on an evolutionary (vs transformative) character.

The US case provides a foundation for framing issues for cross-national research comparing among macro-level educational infrastructures, patterns of instructional organization and classroom instruction.

Such research would move beyond reductionist approaches to cross-national research toward new approaches that examine how histories, legacy architectures, contemporary reforms and patterns of instructional organization and management interact to shape students’ day-to-day lives in classrooms.

Since the 1990s the concept of the learning organization has been promoted as a way to restructure educational organizations to meet new challenges such as more autonomy, school improvement and better performances. Gradually, schools have started to use the concept and are developing tools and processes for testing the ideas in practice. This article pursues two goals. First, it explores how the more visionary and theoretical framework of the learning organization can be translated into the daily practice of primary schools. For that purpose ten experts were extensively interviewed in the field of educational innovation and asked questions about the conditions, stimuli and obstacles for organizational learning. Second, the authors give examples of how some Dutch primary schools act as learning organizations. Using these examples, the article explores how the idea of the learning organization is put into practice in the field of education and how we can learn from these examples.

The purpose of the current study is to explore the influence of knowledge management (KM) in education management organizations (EMOs) Schools of Pakistan. Knowledge plays a pivotal role in the development of an organization due to sharing and managing of knowledge within an organization. In an era of competitiveness, KM has become a significant factor for the sustainable development of educational organizations. Knowledge and KM has become a key element in various fields of knowledge including health, technologies, engineering, social sciences, natural science, business and education. Organizations can adopt KM to improve effectiveness and gain advantage over other organizations. Also, it helps them to make well calculated decisions for the benefit of the organization. KM leads to increase in efficacy, more work, better performance, enhancing staff’s competency through quality decisions.

The research study is descriptive type research by nature, and a qualitative approach was adopted for gathering data and within it the desk review was conducted. The data was analyzed through content analysis techniques. The secondary data was collected in this study. Therefore, the unit of analysis includes the government documents, published research articles and international agencies reports, journal articles, websites, e-books and internet resources, conference papers, case studies and the statistics available on KM in development of organizations in educational settings.

The findings of the study show that through KM the EMOs school can perform better and give outstanding results in terms of student’s achievements. Further, organizations can develop a system which helps them to take timely decisions for enhancing the image of school among all stakeholders including parents, community, teachers and society.

The present study can benefit educational organizations, stakeholders, policymakers, provincial and federal governments and society. This will contribute to the new body of knowledge in the domain of education for knowledge creation and sharing.

This study is conducted in the context of EMOs schools. So, this may be the first research study in this area. In this connection, the study has originality in the context of KM in educational organization in Pakistan.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the relationship between business and education and thereby offer a research agenda for examining the influence of business on education. Educational research has given relatively limited attention to the impact of business on education.

This paper describes a theoretical framework drawn from organization theory that identifies five types of influence of business on education. The emerging literature on business‐school relations is accessed not to present a comprehensive review of research on the impact of business on education, but rather to identify issues regarding the impact of business on education that bear the scrutiny of researchers and educational and business leaders and policy makers.

The types of influence include business consuming the outputs of schools, supplying inputs to schools, competing with public schools for students and state funding, shaping educational policy at various levels, and distributing wealth in ways that indirectly affects education.

This paper identifies an issue that requires further research and policy attention and offers a conceptual framework and research agenda.

At a time when many education systems are grappling with the issue of school reform, there is a concern that traditional UK secondary schools are organised in a way that makes them unable to respond to increasingly complex environmental demands. This research-based paper uses complexity theory to gauge the organisational differences between (1) the traditional model of schooling based on same-age organisation and (2) a form of organisation based on multi-age tutor groups, one that schools call a vertical tutoring (VT) system. The intention is to highlight the organisational changes made by schools that choose to transition from their same-age iteration to the VT system, and expose organisational assumptions in the dominant same-age structure that may account for the failure of reform.

The author's consultancy and research work spans two decades, and includes around 200 UK secondary schools, and others in China, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Qatar, Germany and Colombia. This conceptual paper draws on the recorded discourse and critical reflections of leadership teams during programmes of transformative learning, the process involved in the transition from one system to another. Using descriptions of school organisation abstracted from the complexity literature, differences in the two models not otherwise apparent, come into sharp focus. These not only reveal a substantive connection between organisation, complexity, and individual and organisational learning, but offer insights into the challenge of school reform.

Same-age organisations act in ways that regulate and restrict the agency of participating actors (staff, students and parents). The effect is to reduce a school’s learning capacity and ability to absorb the value demand on its system. Such a system is closed and non-complex. VT schools construct an open and fluid learning system from the base, deregulating agency. By unfreezing their structure, they intervene in processes of power, necessitating the distribution of leadership to the organisational edge, a process of complexification. The form of organisation chosen by a school explains the failure of reform.

Insights from VT schools cast considerable doubt on the viability of traditional same-age structures to serve complex societies and communities, while highlighting the critical role played by complexity theory in organisational praxis. If correct, the current emphasis on teacher “will and skill”, curricular editing, pedagogy and the “what works agenda” will be insufficient to bring about reformational change and more likely to contribute to systemic stasis.