Distributed Leadership and Alignment Optimization: A comparative, cross-cultural perspective across 40 countries.

Distributed leadership (DL) is an increasingly used concept among researchers, policymakers, and educationalists worldwide. However, a limited study in the literature compares principal distributed leadership scale cross-culturally and posits to rank countries regarding their principal distributed leadership properties. The purpose of this study employs an alignment optimization approach to compare the latent mean of principal distributed leadership across 40 countries using The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS, 2018) data. In this study, we used a relatively novel and recent approach known as Alignment Optimization (Asparouhov & Muthen, 2014; Muthen & Asparouhov, 2018) to compare latent means of distributed leadership scale from the perspective of principals. To the best of our knowledge, there is no alignment optimization study by employing principal distributed leadership scale) using The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS, 2018), which is one of the most widespread multi-country assessments conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) across the world (OECD, 2019a). We choose Alignment Optimization over traditional measurement invariance approaches like partial invariance. The partial measurement invariance approach is a bit demanding, mainly once there are many groups or many items within each factor in the model since it needs manually adjusting the model as guided by the modification indices. This study revealed that Korea, Colombia, Shanghai (China) and Lithuania had the highest level of distributed leadership processes from principals' perspective, whereas the Netherlands, Belgium, Argentina, and Japan had the least principal distributed leadership perceptions. The finding of this study gives some valuable insights to policymakers, national governments, and educational systems to assimilate such that distributed leadership might be enhanced.