Leader Succession in School Settings

Abstract

Conventional wisdom maintains that changing administrators will improve school performance. Some research evidence suggests, however, that because leader succession is disruptive to communication, decisionmaking and power processes, it will have either no causal effect or a negative effect on organizational effectiveness. Even if the impacts are modest, leader succession produces a naturally occurring set of events that provides excellent opportunities for researchers to assess administrator effects on school performance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is threefold: (a) to construct a model that specifies a number of major school process and outcome variables associated with administrator succession, (b) to review the succession literature for each component, and (c) to suggest a variety of research strategies to examine administrator succession and effects of leaders on school processes and outcomes