Understanding Leadership in Educational Leadership Research in Finland

This systematic literature review focuses on previous academic research on leadership in the context of the Finnish education system for minors, including early childhood education and care through the secondary level. The aim is to examine how leadership is understood in the focal studies. This is accomplished by acknowledging the leadership concepts of the studies, identifying the locus of leadership in them and ontologically differentiating their understandings of collective. According to the results, leadership was mostly defined as a collective, social phenomenon in nature. Most of these studies drew from an entity-based ontology, meaning that collective forms of leadership were seen as different types of leadership the characteristics of which were studied. Only a few studies drew from process ontology examining collective to be constituted within a flow of relations. The results are discussed in light of international educational leadership research and from the perspective of leadership research approaches in management and organisation studies. Based on our study, we encourage the future research on educational leadership to draw from various ontoepistemological approaches to strengthen the understanding of educational leadership.