Contemporary school principals are required “to play managerial, political, instructional, institutional, human resource and symbolic leadership roles in schools” (Hallinger, 2003, p. 334). For this reason the concept of distributed leadership has evolved, which articulates principals need to develop a shared vision and empower the teachers with expertise to build strong organizational capacity. Though empirical evidence grows steadily, there still lacks the complete evidence on how each of the school leadership responsibilities is actually distributed among the people within the school, given each leadership function needs varied skills and expertise (Leithwood et al., 2007). This current study intends to measure the extent to which school leadership roles are collectively fulfilled by formal leaders who have the position and informal leaders who have the expertise, in order to compare the variations among countries and schools, and further to explore the correlation between distributed leadership and school human capital. Using the 2013 Teaching and Learning International Survey administered by OECD with 32 countries’ public data, and applying rigorous quantitative approaches (Item Response Theory, Hierarchical Linear Model and meta-analysis), this study has successfully revealed that significant variation exists among countries regarding how the school fulfils each of the five leadership functions (setting direction, managing instruction, hiring people, setting school incentive structure and developing people) by either collaborating with or excluding teachers and school community. The pattern of involving informal leaders in managing instruction and developing people is prevailing in certain countries and areas. Most importantly, the meta-analysis results synthesizing 32 countries’ HLM effects indicate informal leaders’ participation in instructional management and teacher development is as significant as formal leaders in predicting teaching quality, as a matter of fact, informal leaders’ leading role in hiring is more important than formal leaders to recruit high-quality teachers.
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