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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Leadership in Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1537035
This article is part of the Research Topic Extended Education - Leadership in Practice View all 5 articles
Collaborative or Distributed? Exploring the Context-Dependent Variations in Leadership After-School Programs
Provisionally accepted- University of Teacher Education Bern, Bern, Switzerland
The field of after-school programs (ASP) in Switzerland is complex and heterogenous. Since ASP have developed over the past decades without neither national guidelines nor a clear purpose, the services and programs differ considerably. Furthermore, the delineation of leadership styles, the roles and responsibilities of leaders in ASP remain ambiguous. This empirical study describes the relationship between the organizational context of ASPs and different leadership styles. A newly developed framework of context-dependent leadership in ASP serves as a tool to interpret the commonalities between the experiences of five different ASP leaders. The findings show that the broader municipal context shapes the way ASP leaders navigate their inter-and intra-organizational leadership role. The results indicate that ASP leaders must be flexible in their leadership styles according to the context and responsibilities. The results point to important nuances of collaborative and distributed leadership styles which characterize leadership in ASP and call for ASP specific leadership development strategies that account for context-dependent variations.
Keywords: Leaderhip, qualitative research, All-day schools, governance, Collaborative leadership, Distributed leadership
Received: 29 Nov 2024; Accepted: 10 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jutzi, Aguilar and Stampfli. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Michelle Jutzi, University of Teacher Education Bern, Bern, Switzerland
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