Page 29 - Mini-Module 7

Statement 4

The culture in which teachers find themselves has a
strong impact on the extent of leadership exercised by
them.
Teacher leadership is embedded in culture (Gonzales, 2004).
Teachers’ role perceptions are thus shaped by the school culture
as well as the societal culture. As for many teachers in Hong
Kong, their traditional roles have been related mainly to
improving teaching and learning in the classrooms, and to
managing people and resources in their subject departments or
committees. Many teachers therefore do not construct their
roles as leaders. This study showed that to some extent the
Chinese cultural context has shaped the current professional
identity of many teachers. In Chinese societies like Hong Kong,
the values of harmony and respect for hierarchy are
pre-eminent, and group harmony outweighs individualism
(Dimmock, 2002; Walker, 2004). Under the influence of these
Chinese core values, followers in an organisation should respect
and obey their seniors. Given this, teachers in this study
acknowledged that they accepted their roles as followers instead
of leaders, even though they had actually taken on informal lead-
ership roles in the school context.

Another constraint to teacher leadership is the micropolitical
context of the workplace. Sometimes, teachers hesitate to
exercise leadership for fear of being too aggressive in a teacher
culture of isolation and privatism.

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