Leadership research has looked at what aspects of leadership lead to successful outcomes in the educational, health or corporate contexts (Campos, Aubert, Guo & Joanpere, 2020; Lemmetty & Collin, 2020; Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008). In this vein, educational leadership research has aimed to identify the ways in which leadership is linked with achieving successful outcomes at the school level (Karadağ, Bektaş, Çoğaltay & Yalçın, 2015) and how school leaders can contribute to student achievement through the practices and changes that they implement, which can in turn transform the school culture (Karadağ et al., 2015). So, school leadership that can have transformative outcomes, is of great interest to those seeking to bring about reform in educational practice. However, in recent years, societies worldwide have become more diverse due to increased globalization, and this has called for a leadership approach that embraces greater diversity (Santamaría, 2014).

Within this context, an emerging form of leadership is dialogic leadership which identifies how different members of the community come together and through shared dialogue develop a sustainable leadership practice (Padrós & Flecha, 2014). Dialogic leadership was conceptualized as a result of the success of the INCLUDE-ED project from the 6^th Framework Programme of the European Commission. While aiming to analyze the best educational practices in schools, the project identified the strength of dialogue as its use among community members led to very positive outcomes (Padrós & Flecha, 2014). The role of dialogue in educational leadership was highlighted earlier when it was demonstrated that using a strategy to encourage meaningful dialogue between the board members and staff at a school, led to overall organizational success and achieved positive outcomes for individuals (Deakins, 2007). However, the more recent conceptualization of dialogic practice calls for participation by the whole community in schools, which is achieved by the inclusion of the voices of all members in important processes like decision making (Redondo-Sama, 2015). In the schools taking up this form of leadership, families, teachers, students and volunteers from the community all get involved in supporting the school through active engagement in school activities, which helps the school and also strengthens the neighbourhood (Padrós & Flecha, 2014). Importantly, the dialogic practices in these schools are helping to achieve improvement in academic outcomes (Redondo-Sama, 2015), which has been a foremost objective of educational leadership (Witziers, Bosker & Krüger, 2003).

The dialogic practices support further learning and cognitive development, and Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory can be used to understand these as the underlying theoretical framework as proposed by Mercer and Howe (2012). The sociocultural theory emphasizes the importance of interactional dialogue on learning (Mercer & Howe, 2012). Knowledge is constructed through interactions among individuals, so, the schools implementing these strategies are achieving effective results with increased dialogue (Redondo-Sama, 2015). Less is known yet about the role of dialogic leadership in student success, so, the purpose of the current systematic literature review is to review the literature on dialogic leadership. The main aim of the current research is to analyse the development of dialogic leadership practice and contextualize it within the educational leadership research.

The PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) model was followed for the current systematic literature review (Page et al., 2021). During the first phase, the authors narrowed down the journals from the JCR and Scimago databases. The journal list was maintained and updated in an excel file. Firstly, on JCR the categories ‘Education and educational sciences’ and the category ‘Social sciences – interdisciplinary’ were searched to find relevant journals. Similarly, a search was carried out on Scimago and consequentially 111 journals were selected from both databases, after removing duplicates. During the next phase of journal selection, the number of articles in each journal related to educational leadership and dialogic leadership was examined. So, the final selection was made based on the topic relevance and the number of relevant articles which resulted in 30 journals. Another source identified for the literature was the CORDIS website where other EU-funded projects related to the current project were identified, in order to incorporate the European context. The literature search was carried out from November to December 2022 from the selected journals and the EU- funded projects. Only articles from 2000 onwards were to be included in the literature search. To conduct a thorough literature search, literature was also searched on the following databases: Web of Science, SCOPUS and Google Scholar. Boolean operators were used to make search terms more specific. While ‘educational leadership’ and ‘dialogic leadership’ were used as keywords, the search term “(dialogue) OR ("dialogic leadership") AND (leadership)” was also used. Finally, 22 articles were selected for the literature review after deleting the ones that were recurring or not relevant. Since there is limited research on dialogic leadership, an exploratory approach was taken for the analysis. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted, and themes were extracted from the literature after a thorough reading of the selected articles. During the first round, the abstracts of the articles were read and then categorized together based on similar topics in a matrix. Afterwards the articles were read through, and several descriptive themes were identified. After scrutinizing the descriptive themes, the articles were re-read to gain an understanding of how these descriptive themes are connected. These descriptive themes were then categorized based on similarities to reveal four main analytical themes for the current review.

The main aim of this systematic review was to analyze how dialogic leadership fits in the educational leadership research and to understand the role of dialogic leadership in education. The thematic analysis revealed four themes which address the objectives stated earlier. 1) Social justice orientation: While a transformation of the ethnic makeup of societies has resulted in greater diversity, it has also brought with it a challenge for educational leadership (Furman, 2012). There was a need within educational leadership to adopt a multicultural perspective with an emphasis on social justice (Santamaria, 2014). The practice of dialogic leadership within education as evidenced so far has seen the inclusion of diverse members of community and it has ensured equality by giving equal importance to the voice of each member (Padrós & Flecha, 2014). 2) Social Cohesion: One of the effects that the implementation of the dialogic model has had is the reduction of miscommunication because of increased dialogue (Deakins, 2009) and consequentially it has led to the development of a sense of community and togetherness (Temple & Ylitalo, 2009). 3) Improved well-being: Another outcome that was observed in institutions observing dialogic practices, is an improvement in the general well-being of the individuals involved which was believed to improve performance (Yliruka & Karvinen-Niinikoski, 2013). This improvement in well-being has been noted as an indirect effect that the exchange of dialogue can produce. 4) Improved academic outcomes: The main effect of the dialogic leadership model being implemented in schools was an improvement in the students’ academic outcomes (Redondo-Sama, 2015). This model enabled teachers, parents and children to interact, share knowledge and to become empowered, which led to success (Padrós & Flecha, 2014). Overall, it can be concluded that dialogic leadership practices are paving the way for embracing diversity, building community, and enhancing educational achievements.

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