| Leaders are one of the more important components of an organization because of their significant influence in enhancing organizational performance and in spearheading important projects. Researchers have proposed distributed leadership in order to survive the changing demands of organizational leadership. A study based on the perspectives of leaders on distributed leadership is essential to know whether this type of leadership is effective not only in the education sector but also to other sectors. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory embedded multiple case study was to explore the experiences and perceptions of organizational leaders regarding the key characteristics that are required within the framework of distributed leadership. The study was guided by two research questions. First, how to determine the key characteristics that are required within the framework of distributed leadership from the perspective of organizational leaders. Second, to determine the reasons organizational leaders believe that their organizations seemed to resist distributed leadership. All four organizational types (for-profit, non-profit, military, and religious) discussed five essential characteristics as essential to the distributed leadership model: moral purpose, ethics, knowledge building, effective communication, and shared vision. Moreover, most participants in these four organizational types had faced obstacles in the implementation of these five characteristics. The experiences of the participants of four organizational types largely support the current academic literature on distributed leadership. However, the experiences also deviate in some ways, suggesting that further research could be needed to explore how lived experiences could help alter the theoretical underpinnings of the distributed leadership model. |
