Tillsammans är man mindre ensam : om delat skolledarskap

The present study thesis aims to contribute to increased knowledge about how a shared leadership in the school can be constructed and understood. The study's knowledge object is shared leadership in the school. The study objects are school leaders who work together as well as their ideas about how they jointly construct a shared leadership in the school. In the present study, school leaders refer to the persons at the school who are the head of the teachers and other staff, with the task of leading the school's activities. This can thus be a principal or an assistant principal. The thesis is based on a qualitative study with interviews of school leaders who work together in what can be described as shared leadership. The interviews were conducted in pairs using a technique that in Swedish school development research has come to be called an interview with a performance chart. In the interviews, the school leaders who participated in the study were given the opportunity to jointly design the leadership as they perceived it to be designed whitin their activities. The study describes, analyzes and discusses these social constructions. The starting point for the analysis and the subsequent discussion is linked to previous research on shared leadership and organizational theory's way of managing leadership in relation to the business's need for structures that enable both stability and change. Based on an organizational argument, I discuss how school leaders working in shared leadership distribute tasks among themselves and how this distribution affects work organization and development organization. On the basis of the social constructivist theory as a theory of science in the study, I have found hermeneutics useful to describe how I have interpreted my results. The result shows that the different pairs of leaders lead with different kinds of shared leadership: co-leadership, functional leadership and in some cases even a mixture of these. The time spent on building a shared base for shared leadership influences the form of shared leadership that was constructed. The more time that was devoted to talking to each other and creating a common foundation to stand on, the more the school leaders came to lead together in a so-called co-leadership. Unless joint time was allocated, there was a tendency to divide work tasks between themselves and lead through functional leadership