Superintendents & district senior leadership teams

The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how superintendents create and lead their senior leadership teams. Research on senior teams in the private sector suggests that studying top teams, rather than CEOs alone, provides better predictions of organizational outcomes (Finkelstein, Hambrick, and Cannella, Jr., 2009). While many superintendents have also begun to increasingly rely upon a senior team as a result of the growing complexity and demands of their own role (Worner, 2010; Harris, 2009), there has been little discussion in the education literature about how superintendents might most effectively create and lead senior teams (Higgins et al., 2009). Using multiple-case study methodology, I examined three large district senior leadership teams and the levers that three urban superintendents utilized to create and lead their senior leadership teams. My primary data sources consisted of interviews with the superintendents and senior team members. The research questions guiding my study were: (1) How do superintendents create and lead their senior teams? (2) In what ways are the district senior teams perceived to be effective? Overall, the case studies affirmed much of the theoretical framework I developed as part of my literature review. However, the stories of superintendents and team members also revealed complexities of leading in a large school district context. Superintendents were challenged with productively managing turnover, engaging their school boards as they created their senior team, and clarifying purposes of different teams. In addition, superintendents struggled with clarifying decision-making processes as well as individual team member autonomy in a fast-paced environment.