Distributed Leadership, Organisational Commitment and Job Satisfaction among Public Secondary School Teachers: Survey Evidence from Lahore, Pakistan

Abstract

Distributed leadership has become one of the most widely endorsed ideas in school leadership scholarship, yet the empirical base supporting its claimed effects on teacher attitudes remains concentrated in Western and East Asian systems whose governance arrangements differ sharply from those of South Asia. This study examines how teachers in Pakistani public secondary schools perceive the distribution of leadership in their schools, and how those perceptions relate to organisational commitment and job satisfaction. A cross-sectional survey was administered to 300 secondary school teachers (149 men, 151 women; 95.2% response) drawn from 65 randomly selected government secondary schools in district Lahore. The instrument combined items from two established distributed leadership inventories across five dimensions including school leader behaviour, shared vision, values and beliefs, collaboration and cooperation, and decision making alongside affective commitment and job satisfaction scales (48 items; α = .79–.91). Teachers reported moderate to strong perceptions of distributed leadership (M = 3.47, SD = 0.77 on a five-point scale), with collaboration and cooperation rated highest and values and beliefs lowest. Perceived distribution of leadership was strongly associated with commitment (r = .615) and with job satisfaction (r = .719), and accounted for 37.8% and 51.7% of their variance respectively. Gender differences were negligible throughout (all d < 0.20). The findings support the transferability of distributed leadership effects to a highly centralised, examination-driven system, but also expose a distinctive pattern: participation in decisions is experienced as available while collective professional standards and relational recognition are not. Implications for school leadership development in Punjab are discussed alongside the methodological limits of single-source cross-sectional designs.