Educational leadership in Europe: A transcultural approach

Abstract

Leadership in education is one of the factors relevant to the study of educational capital of a country and a fundamental variable in the analysis of academic performance is especially distributive leadership and instructional leadership. The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship of some fundamental factors, derived from TALIS report (human resource structure in each center, training needs, level of collaboration and cooperation among faculty for academic activities and professional involvement of teachers) with leadership styles (instructional or distributive) in some European countries. For each school we have obtained a series of global indicators to characterize each of those factors. Thus, data have been derived for a total sample of 3,835 centers 21 countries. Using the factor scores from a confirmatory factor analysis model a whole cluster was estimated using the Mahalanobis distance finding similarities between European countries and analyzed using regression coefficients were estimated variables that are related to leadership styles. The results indicate that the impact of exogenous factors between the two types of leadership styles are not the same as the geographical area under consideration and, specifically, the Spanish centers show an intermediate behavior between more developed educational models such as North Europe and the more diffuse areas of southern and central Europe.