Distributed Leadership

Distributed leadership is a conceptual and analytical approach to understanding how the work of leadership takes place among the people within, and in the context of, a complex organization. It was developed and is primarily used in education research, though it has since been applied to other domains including business and tourism. Rather than focusing on the traits of an individual leader or the features of a particular situation, distributed leadership foregrounds how people across an organization engage in tasks that are stretched, or distributed, across it, drawing its own theoretical foundations from activity theory and distributed cognition to treat leadership as a situated, social process arising at the intersection of leaders, followers and the situation itself.