In many studies and analyses of school organization and leadership it is not unusual to consider the actors using two categories: leaders/managers and teachers respectively. It is dominating empirically as well as the concepts in the literature. We have leaders/managers who relates to followers, and teachers who relates to the superiors. But a rather modest change in perspective we can observe, that the pattern is much more ambiguous. Often we find that the vast majority of actors at the same time are related to colleges, subordinates and superiors. In other words: they are temporary or more permanent middle leaders. And this is my point of departure.

But at the same time we may see a remarkable variation in different types of middle leaders, spending from e.g. vice chancellors to team leaders. And similar formal titles may have different content from country to country and sometimes also from school to school.

This situation may lead to different perceptions between schools as well as inside the single school about the role and the position of middle leaders. And as a consequence, the situation creates an uncertainty concerning who actually are leaders. This uncertainty stems from both perspectives. The middle leaders may be perceived as leaders while they maybe view themselves as colleges, or the opposite case may also be a possibility. Middle leaders are leaders without a perceived authority.

Some of these uncertainties and ambiguities are derived from the fact that no clear definition exist, neither in the literature, organization charts, nor in collective agreements. Bennett (2007:454) use following definition: “teachers who has non-teaching responsibilities, but were not seen as senior members of staff”. Other distinguishes if the middle leaders are responsible for other staff or not? And this responsibility is not only concerning the content of other teachers work, but also on their working conditions.

This study will focus on middle leadership through a theoretical perspective from the principal-agent theory. This approach allows us to go beyond an apparently hierarchical structure, focusing on several dimensions of the mutual relations and dependencies. It will from both leader and follower perspective show attention to

• the incitements and motivation structures and patterns,
• the explicit and implicit contracts between the actors, and the repertoire of possible sanctions,
• the balance between trust and control,
• the distribution of information and knowledge between the actors and the possibility of moral hazard behavior.

This focus may enlarge our knowledge concerning the agency relations between (the different types of) middle leaders and their (different types of) followers? And the question emphasizes a paradoxical situation, where many middle leaders lead teachers who actually are led by other leaders.  

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