Helping Teacher Leadership Teams: Enhancing Teaming by Focusing Knowledge Integration

Teacher Leadership Teams (TLTs) are cross-functional teams, and thus knowledge integration is central to their teaming. Importantly, the existing literature maintains that cross-functional teams apply the traverse or transcend approach differently to integrate divergent knowledge, but few studies have directly focused on it within the context of TLTs. Studies on leadership teams in schools have highlighted political and/or cultural perspectives and mainly stressed team/organizational conditions that might influence the TLT process of using two knowledge integration approaches. Therefore, our research analyzed how one TLT employed two knowledge integration approaches in consideration of team/organizational conditions. More specifically, we conducted qualitative research using the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory as an analytic lens. We identified that the TLT used traverse, transcend, and mixed approaches, and that its context influenced the team’s hybrid use by determining when the team utilized each approach. We believe that our findings contribute to revealing TLTs’ actual knowledge integration process by empirically examining one TLT’s use of knowledge integration approaches. Our findings also contribute to developing a more comprehensive framework to understand TLT knowledge integration by addressing existing research from political and cultural perspectives and suggesting further areas of focus (i.e., functional conditions) for future research.