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In an era of increased autonomy and accountability in education, school principals have been given the responsibility for many tasks that used to be centralized, such as hiring and managing personnel, ensuring that the curriculum is followed and that the development of the school is on the right path. In this study an exploration is attempted into the associations among institutional context, school leadership, school climate and student outcomes.

The authors analyze data from the Programme of International Student Assessment study 2015 to identify variations in institutional context (autonomy and accountability) among education systems to determine whether and how institutional context is associated with leadership and whether education systems, in turn, are associated with school climate and students' achievement in reading. To account for the hierarchical structure of the education systems under investigation, a three-level structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was employed to analyze the data gathered on the institutions, schools and students.

No association was found between the degree of autonomy of an education system and leadership behavior; however, accountability and leadership seemed to go together. Achievement in reading competencies was greater in school systems in which principals had more autonomy. At the school level, a relationship was found between leadership and opportunities for parental involvement.

The results of this study indicate the need of strong leadership in order to have better results when there is more accountability. In this sense, the authors' findings also point to the increased importance of context-sensitive leadership skills.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a global digitalization of organizational activities: the pandemic forced people and organizations to profoundly review values, purposes and norms. However, the research on how digital technologies impact human relationships and interactions at work results fragmented. Still, the importance of understanding which behaviors and norms enhance social interactions and organizational performances in digital environments remains critical, especially after COVID-19 advent. Therefore, this study explores how human relationships change in a wholly digital environment and what to expect for the new normal.

The study first explores the research gap through a systematic literature review to clearly understand what emerged so far. Second, through semi-structured interviews and a focus group, an empirical analysis was conducted.

Findings suggest that both work and emotional dimensions are crucial to nurturing human relationships in a digital environment. More precisely, the study unveils the need for innovative leaders to review their approaches to communication and the work experience and consider the emotional dimension in terms of community purpose and individual well-being, while identifying rituals as an overlapping tool. Finally, the authors propose a parallelism between these results and the agile revolution to inspire leaders to rethink their leadership and behaviors getting closer to the agile approach, which may represent a valuable way to rethink human relations in our professional environment.

The paper sheds light on an ongoing phenomenon that touches the lives of each organizational actor. The two-step structure hopes to provide both a structured base of the knowledge developed to date, proposing a systematic view of what has been studied since the outbreak of the pandemic to date and to provide insights for future developments.

During the COVID-19 crisis in Victoria, Australia the complexity of school leadership increased greatly for school principals. This study focused on the lived experiences of early career principals in the independent school sector from March to November 2020 in Victoria, Australia. It investigates transformative work that was undertaken by these leaders in leading their schools over a protracted crisis.

The study builds on constructs of crisis leadership, adaptive leadership, agile leadership and emotional intelligence, exploring the leadership approaches undertaken by twenty-two early career principals in Victoria, Australia. Using a narrative inquiry approach, across three temporal points in 2020, storied productions drawn from the findings present four emergent types of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches undertaken by these principals. These leadership approaches are presented as the commander-leader, the conductor-leader, the gardener-leader and the engineer-leader with each approach demonstrating both organisational leadership approaches as well as individual leadership styles used by these principals as they led their schools.

The findings have direct implications for professional development programs focusing on aspiring principals and early career principals with emphasis on the importance of developing emotionally intelligent skillsets in principals for use during periods of rapid change or high crisis in schools. The findings present insight into the support useful for early career principals in the first five years of principalship.

This study uses a unique emotional intelligence approach to understand school leadership during and after a crisis.

The aim of this paper is to identify the role of the principal in establishing a whole school approach for health and wellbeing. Two questions are asked: (1) What do successful Swedish principals do when they take on a whole school approach? (2) How do these results relate to previous research on successful school leadership?

This paper focuses on the complexity of organisational processes and considers the role of successful leadership in managing a whole school approach to health promotion. It presents findings from two different but interlinked projects, and draws on document studies and interviews with principals, student health team members and teachers in Sweden.

This paper argues that successful school leaders are crucial in establishing a whole school approach, because of the work they do to synchronise the health-promoting activities in schools. The study identifies four aspects of coordination that need to be enacted simultaneously when leading health-promoting processes. The fifth aspect identified is that a whole school approach is not limited to the school, but the whole local school context, i.e. a synchronisation between different system levels.

Although limited in scale, this paper reports key findings that could have practical implications for school leaders. The study suggests that successful school leadership research needs to use a health-promoting lens in order to make leadership practices health-promoting practices. It also proposes extended comparative research from different fields and contexts.

This study explores to what extent health promotion policy in practice and leadership engagement is reflected in school actors' experiences of health dialogues (HDs) and their ideas about promoting health and learning in schools.

The 93 participants consisted of 44 school nurses, 37 students in grades 4, 7 or the first year of high school and 12 teachers, who shared their experiences with HDs by writing open letters.

The qualitative content analysis resulted in four themes: Putting health on the agenda, Finding a common goal, Walking side by side and Pointing out a healthy direction. The participants' expectations of school health promotion leadership are revealed in suggestions on how the HDs can fulfill both the educational assignment and promote student health.

Based on the findings, we argue that for successful school health promotion leaders need to acknowledge the field of tension where leadership has to take place, anchor health promotion policy and administer “a Sandwich approach” – a top-down and bottom-up leadership simultaneously that facilitates school-based health promotion.

When different school actors (school nurses, teachers and students) are given a voice, a collective picture of HDs can emerge and help develop health promotion practices.

The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of long-term thinking in a non-business context to gain deeper insights into bridging the gap between the theory of long-term thinking and its application as a management strategy.

To explore the concept of long-thinking further in a non-business setting, a grounded theory study was conducted with preschool leaders in a municipality in Sweden to examine how the leaders describe, define and apply the concept of long-term thinking in their schools. Interviews with school leaders, both written and oral, were used for data collection.

This study illustrates that the concept of long-term thinking can be twofold. First, the description can be as an anchor that reflects a mission. Second, the description can be a steering mechanism that guides decision-making. The findings also reinforce the importance of organisations developing an organisational culture that connect their vision and goals with the values and needs of their customers.

This study was carried out in a single organisation and shows a snapshot of the organisation's status at the time the data were collected. Therefore, the findings are not generalisable to all organisational settings; rather the findings may be transferable to other settings.

The results can be used to help identify areas where preschools in a municipal context can engage with sustainable quality development in order to build systems that support work with quality in a more structured way.

Long-term thinking is seen, within both theory and organisations, as necessary to achieve success in terms of sustainable development and quality, and this study contributes with knowledge about the current gap between theories of long-term thinking and practice in organisations.

Background: Most children in low-income countries complete their elementary education with low competency in essential reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Besides, about 250 million students are not learning the basics, most of whom have spent at least four years in school, and this failure is coined the global learning crisis. This study aimed to examine educational quality management practices perceived by secondary school teachers.

Methods: The study employed a multilevel mixed-method design. Employing a simple random sampling technique, the researcher selected 251 teachers from 10 secondary schools in the research regions. He collected data through a researcher-designed questionnaire, school standards, and student achievement records from November 2018 to March 2019. He analyzed data from a questionnaire using frequency, percentage, mean, Pearson correlation, and exploratory factor analysis. The document review concerning quality management was analyzed using content analysis to triangulate the quantitative findings.

Results: At the school level, the study revealed the impracticality of laboratories. Besides, incompetent and unmotivated teachers and students ran the education business from the input side. At the same level, principals' management practices on staff development and encouraging parents to support their schools were low. The principals' management practices in the teaching-learning process were also undesirable at the classroom level. Overall, the study revealed incredibly insufficient input, process, and output management in the study context.

Conclusion: Hence, the study concluded that it is difficult to achieve the very objectives of producing creative, critical, and problem-solving individuals through this type of educational provision and its management. Due to this, it is not easy to achieve quality education for all goals.

This study aims to identify context-specific antecedents to schools’ absorptive capacity (AC) and to show how those can enact “a virtuous learning circle.”

The study uses a mixed method: an exploration based on semi-structured interviews with educational experts; the development of a measurement scale and a partial least squares structural equation modelling to test the impact of the antecedents.

The results yielded four empirically-grounded antecedents and their measurement scales, namely, prior knowledge, employees’ skills, educational projects and interactions with the environment (Studies one and two). All antecedents are significantly and positively related to AC processes (study three). Using the organizational learning theory perspective, the results have been interpreted as an AC “virtuous learning circle.”

With increasing pressures to adapt, a case of which was the COVID-19 pandemic, schools can greatly benefit from absorbing knowledge flows. This suggests the construction a favourable environment for AC. To this end, the individual (employees’ prior knowledge and skills), organizational (educational projects) and institutional level of managerial action (interactions with the environment) can be effective when create a recursive organizational learning circle. In addition, this study offers an expert-validated measurement scale for self-assessment of a school’s specific contingencies, and thus, for planning of punctual interventions to develop AC.

This study advances the existing body of knowledge management in the educational context by rigorously identifying and validating a scale for measuring the antecedents of AC and developing an interpretive approach to the AC “virtuous circle.”

The purpose of this paper is to explore existing and desired methodologies for systematic quality work to promote quality in preschools from the principal’s perspective.

A collaborative approach was used in this research project, and principals were asked to complete portfolio assignments. Their answers to those portfolio assignments were analysed by the research team and subsequently compared to total quality management values.

Existing and desired methodologies for systematic quality work are presented and sorted into 13 and 17 groups, respectively. The principals desire four times more methodologies than they are presently using to promote systematic quality work, and the results show that they must extend their methodologies to support TQM values.

This research is based on answers collected from 18 principals in one municipality in Sweden.

The use of the cornerstone model provides a framework to illustrate the application of TQM in preschools.

Principals struggle to find time for systemic quality work. The presented results can be used to work systematically with quality in preschools and other organizations.

This study aims to explore virtual leadership work within educational settings in the light of social disruption. In 2020, a global pandemic changed the way we work. For school leaders, that involved running a virtual school overnight. Although there is a stream of research that explores leadership in solely virtual communities, there is a gap in the literature regarding practices that transition from analog to virtual practices and the changes in leadership in those types of work practices.

The data gathering method constitutes a questionnaire to explore school leaders’ experiences of virtual work and virtual leadership in light of social disruption. One hundred and five Swedish school leaders answered the questionnaire covering both fixed and open questions.

The results show that school leaders’ general experiences of transition to virtual school have worked relatively well. We show how the work changes and shift the focus in the virtual workplace.

The author’s contributions include theorizing about leadership affordances in virtual schools and providing implications for practice. The authors summarize our main contribution in five affordances that characterize virtual leadership, including a focus on core activities, trust-based government, 1:1 communication with staff, structure and clarity and active outreach activities. The results could be interesting for understanding the radical digitalization of leadership in the digital workplace.