Prompted by the ideology of New Public Management, the increasing scale of schools and decentralization of education, led to a steady increase of school autonomy in the last few decades. This increasing autonomy of schools required another, more professional mode of governance. In designing this new modes of school board governance, most attention is usually paid to the formal structures, good governance codes and regulations.
This paper however argues that it is particularly important for the effective management of schools to focus on the actual behaviour of school boards instead. The research question this paper aims to answer is the question which behaviour makes school boards effective. School boards are teams. They are nevertheless a special kind of team: their output is purely cognitive and they meet less regularly, which leaves them, compared to management teams that meet daily, with few opportunities to resolve disagreements.
Hackman and Wageman (2004; 2005) determine three behavioural factors that contribute to the effectiveness of teams: the level of effort expended by the team members collectively; the performance strategies used and the knowledge and skill the team members contribute to their tasks. These behavioural determinants align with the elements of the model of corporate board performance presented by Forbes and Milliken (1999). They added conflict to behaviour relevant for board performance. Building on both, we have developed a more comprehensive model of school board behaviour in which we assess the effectiveness of school boards through their level of board task performance (Cf. Heemskerk, Heemskerk, & Wats, 2015).
To answer our research question, a longitudinal research has been set up for which a survey has been designed pre-tested and distributed in 2016 and 2017 among principals and school board members in 500 primary, secondary and vocational schools in the Netherlands. The results indicate that we have to drastically revise our thinking about role of conflicts in effective school board behaviour.
References
Forbes, D. P., & Milliken, F. J. (1999). Cognition and corporate governance: Understanding boards of directors as strategic decision-making groups. The Academy of Management Review, 24(3), 489-505.
Hackman, J. R., & Wageman, R. (2004). When and how team leaders matter. Research in Organizational Behavior, 26, 37-74.
Hackman, J. R., & Wageman, R. (2005). A theory of team coaching. Academy of Management Review, 30(2), 269-287.
Heemskerk, K., Heemskerk, E. M., & Wats, M. (2015). Behavioral determinants of nonprofit board performance. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 25(4), 417-430.
