The paradox of school leadership

School principals face the paradox of leadership in modern bureaucracies. They operate in a tightly regulated system yet are required to bring teachers to voluntary innovative extracurricular activities. A case‐study research in a senior school in Israel, consisting of interviews, unobtrusive observation and document readings, yielded two findings. One revealed that leaders resolve the conflict by mobilizing teachers through three strategies of shaping teachers’ behavior and cognition causing them to redefine their work needs, yet some opposition exists. The second finding was that leaders are successful if they combine transactional and transformational leadership styles in a way that is sensible to the led.