Brechas y patrones predominantes de distribución de liderazgo en dos muestras incidentales de escuelas y liceos en Chile

There is convergence, from multiple sources of knowledge, that distributed leadership is a relevant and pertinent approach for school organizations, due to the high level of interaction and interdependence of potentially influential agents and organizational structure participating in the key processes of the instructional activity. Thus, given the conceptual richness of this theoretical perspective and the need for empirical studies on this approach in Latin America, this article identifies meaningful gaps of perception about distributed leadership in two incidental and independent samples in a hundred of Chilean schools, as well as characterizes predominant patterns of leadership distribution. This was carried out by applying a multifactorial distributed leadership questionnaire to 1500 board of directors and teachers of primary and secondary schools in various regions of Chile. The main results and discussions show, from a theoretical perspective, the high polysemy that distributed leadership possesses. Such attribute coincides with one of the features of the study of the phenomenon of leadership. Regarding gaps in the perception of leadership, both directors and teachers point out that there is a lack of strategies and opportunities within each educational center to foster leadership and its practices. Likewise, there is a strong conviction that distributed leadership would facilitate learning. The main pattern found, among six categories of leadership distribution, is formal, followed by pragmatic and afterwards strategic. All framed within top-down power transfer strategies rather than the bottom-up approach.