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Relationships are increasingly recognized as important contributors to individual and organizational outcomes across a variety of fields (Borgatti and Foster, 2003; Cross et al., 2005). In the area of teacher leadership, scholars have examined the tradeoffs in relational dynamics between formal teacher leadership (i.e. teachers in formally designated roles; Supovitz and Comstock, 2021) and informal or naturally occurring teacher leadership (i.e. teachers who have social influence in their schools without a formal leadership title; Nguyen et al., 2019). Teacher leadership scholarship suggests that, while formal designations recognize strong teachers, they may constrain the relational dynamics necessary for teacher leadership to influence instruction (Comstock and Margolis, 2020). As such, there is tremendous practical and theoretical value in understanding how relational quality and formal roles intersect to influence instructional practice in the context of formal teacher leadership programs.
Given the continued expansion of formalized teacher leadership initiatives by districts and states across the US, we argue that understanding the relational mechanisms at play between teachers and formal teacher leaders (TLs) is important for informing how to best support implementation of these initiatives. Acknowledging previous scholars who argue for clear definitions of teacher leadership (Berg and Zoellick, 2019), we focus on formal TLs, defined as teachers who, in addition to their typical teaching responsibilities, hold official leadership roles, which are granted by their district or school leaders and aimed at influencing their colleagues' instruction (Supovitz and Comstock, 2021).
In this paper, we examine which aspects of teacher-TL relationships are associated with TLs' influence on teachers' instructional practices. To do so, we draw on two different, yet complementary, theoretical perspectives: social network (SN) theory and leader-member exchange (LMX) theory (Sparrowe and Liden, 1997). SN theory is rooted in structuralism: particular features of social structure, such as reciprocal advice-seeking behavior, serve as proxies for determining the quality of relationships (Borgatti and Foster, 2003; Rodway and Daly, 2019). LMX theory describes the relationships that develop between leaders and those they lead (i.e. “members;” Graen and Uhl Bien, 1995). According to LMX, leaders and members engage in exchanges of resources, and the nature of the exchange differs depending on qualities of the relationship (Liden and Maslyn, 1998). Thus, SN research uses the structure of social interactions to make inferences about...