The purpose of this enquiry is to explore how leadership and decision-making was
practiced across various school structures. The research focuses on the practice of
decision making as an element of distributed leadership, its degree of distribution, as
well as its development and enhancement. In focusing on decision-making, the
challenges experienced by both the school management as well level one educators in
the advancement of distributed decision making is documented.
The study was conducted within a qualitative interpretive paradigm and took the form
of a case study of the enactment of decision making in a suburban primary school in
Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal. Data collection techniques employed included openended
questionnaires, observations, semi -structured individual interviews and a focus
group interview. Data was analysed using thematic content analysis. Significant themes
that emerged from the data were the availability of structures and its enhancing or
inhibiting properties for shared decision, the principal as an enabler or disabler of
distributed leadership, the SMT’s support for shared decision making, further strategies
to enhance shared decision making and the challenges to decision making. Gunter’s
(2005) characterisation of distributed leadership served as analytical tools in this study.
My findings revealed that there were a number of decision making structures within the
school and the school milieu encouraged the enactment of shared decision making. The
transformational leadership approach of the SMT and more especially the principal
acted as a catalyst for shared decision making. Despite ample evidence that decision
making was shared, the situation sometimes resulted in the authoritarian approach being
the default position. Further to this, the data sets indicated that decision making and
leadership was widely dispersed; however, the emergent characteristic of dispersed
leadership, while present, was not optimally operational. The involvement of the
majority of teachers in shared decision making was in the form of authorised distributed
leadership. The SMT transformational agenda of inclusion of all educators and the
deliberate orchestration of opportunities to empower educators encapsulated the
democratic distributed leadership characteristic. Teachers’ expansive or restricted level
of participation in decision making was situational. This outcome was used to
conceptualise a framework for the level of participation in decision making.
Despite, an enabling environment, there were some challenges to shared decision
making. These challenges, in the main, were a lack of peer support, self-imposed
barriers such as lack of confidence, a lack of support structures from the DoE and time
constraints. Finally the study presented propositions for the further enhancement and
strengthening of the decision making process in the case school as well as
recommendations for further research. No doubt, the case school has embraced the
tenets of our democracy and has made substantial inroads into creating a shared vision,
through shared participation. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/8254 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Moodley, Ronnie Velayathum. |
| Contributors | Grant, Carolyn., Muzvidziwa, Irene. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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