Understanding decisional procrastination in school leadership: experiences of Turkish school leaders

This study examines Turkish school leaders’ decisional procrastination by exploring the issues they address and the reasons and stages associated with delay. Using an interpretive (hermeneutic) phenomenological design, 15 school leaders were selected through maximum variation sampling. The data were collected through interviews and analyzed using NVivo 14. Key findings indicate that daily operations and educational programs emerged as prominent decision domains, reflecting the dual instructional–managerial workload of school leadership. Decisional procrastination was especially visible in ‘financial resource management’ and ‘student behaviour and academic performance decisions,’ suggesting that delay becomes salient in high-stakes domains. Across the decision cycle, the information-gathering phase appeared as a critical point of delay. Reported drivers include cognitive-emotional strain (e.g. decision fatigue, fear of mistakes), external constraints, strategic prioritization, information-processing challenges, and deliberate strategic waiting. This study conceptualizes decisional procrastination as a process-sensitive and context-bound leadership phenomenon that recurs across decision phases and domains, instead of reducing it to a dysfunctional individual tendency. By tracing Turkish school leaders’ accounts, the study clarifies how delays are shaped by cognitive-emotional demands, stakeholder dynamics, constrained decision conditions, and relational accountability. It provides evidence-led implications for distinguishing strategic pacing, consultative deferral, and protective waiting from depletion in leadership practice.