Distributed leadership, in the literature, has been seen as a move away from heroic, one-person leadership styles (Spillane, 2005). One of its propositions is that leadership activities, responsibilities are “stretched-over” the organization (Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2001, p. 23). However, this is not a mere delegation of responsibilities in which the members of an organization has pre-defined responsibilities. Instead, it proposes that leadership is an already distributed phenomena among the members of school organizations and that researchers and practitioners should consider this in their studies. Harris and Spillane (2008) asserts that distributed leadership has strong associations with different organizational outcomes.

Enabling bureaucracy variable was specifically chosen to investigate the formal structure of schools. Murphy (2013) puts forward in his article that classical bureaucracies in schools has a negative impact on the flexibility, creativity, initiative and professional judgement of schools. He further proposes that it blocks school improvement efforts. On the other hand,              Hoy and Sweetland (2001) propose that not all bureaucracy in schools are the same. They conceptualize four categories of school bureaucracies in schools based on the formalization and centralization of the school bureaucracy: enabling bureaucracy, Rule-bound bureaucracy- Hierarchical Bureaucracy, and hindering bureaucracy. Based on this conceptualization, the variable of enabling bureaucracy has been added to the research question.

Moreover, Freiberg (1999) proposes that there are both formal and informal school structures affecting school performance. Yet, there is little amount of study in the literature that include both formal and informal aspects of schools into their investigation. Furthermore, informal structures in schools have been shown to be soothing down the rigidities of the formal structures and speeding up the processes (Lunenburg & Ornstein, 2011). Thus, to account for the informal structure in schools, teacher collaboration variable has been has been added to the study.

Academic optimism is the final variable that was included in the study. It is a climate variable that has three sub dimensions: collective efficacy of teachers, trust in clients and academic emphasis. According to Hoy (2012) this is a latent variable that has an impact on student achievement even after controlling for student SES. Hence, it has been added to the model to see how it interacts with the other variables.

Based on this discussion, this study investigates the relationship between four organization level variables –distributed leadership, enabling bureaucracy, teacher collaboration, and academic optimism –in public schools in a SEM model.  The study aims to answer the following research question: What is the relationship between distributed leadership, enabling bureaucracy, teacher collaboration, and academic optimism in schools?

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