Is distributed leadership universal? A cross-cultural, comparative approach across 40 countries: an alignment optimisation approach

ENDistributed leadership (DL) is defined as the degree of contact and involvement of various people in making choices or carrying out responsibilities, and is an increasingly used concept among researchers, policymakers, and educationalists worldwide. However, few studies have investigated the cross-cultural comparability of the distributed leadership scale for school principals, and few have ranked countries according to their levels of distributed leadership. This study employs an innovative alignment optimisation approach to compare the latent means of distributed leadership, as perceived by school principals, across 40 countries, using data from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS, 2018). We found that South Korea, Colombia, Shanghai (China), and Lithuania had the highest levels of distributed leadership in school decisions, from the perspective of school principals. In contrast, the Netherlands, Belgium, Argentina, and Japan had the lowest levels. Our findings may serve as guidance for education stakeholders over which nations they could learn from in order to enhance school principal distributed leadership. Keywords: distributed leadership; principal; TALIS 2018; measurement invariance; alignment optimisation; cross-cultural comparability.