Leadership and Organizational Learning

Leadership is seen as moving away from the traditional, hierarchical, rational planning, bureaucratic approach, toward a more collaborative approach with formal and informal leaders. Leadership and organizational learning are interrelated, with organizational learning being dependent on the capacity of the organization to facilitate collaboration among individual learners who take on distributed leadership responsibilities and learn from each other. The greatest challenge faced by school district is how to help schools become professional learning communities when the authoritarian hierarchy remained entrenched in the minds of formal leaders, community members, and government departments. Through a review of relevant empirical literature and reanalysis of five of their previous studies, the authors present a view of leadership that guided their actions and research in Discovery School District.