Chapter 4: Leading Organisations: A Processually Complex View

Chapters 2 and 3 suggest an apparent tension in how leadership is understood. It can be seen as either a group of traits personified in the form of the ‘leader’ who is central to decision-making and agenda setting in a school or as a more dispersed set of processes which occur across a school and which is inherently relational in nature, including aspects of power, the enactment of culture and hence how the tasks of leadership emerge through organisational activity. In this chapter, we take the idea of relational leadership further by underpinning this perspective with a coherent ontological position.