Enacting participatory leadership in regulated education systems: Evidence from Lithuanian schools

This study examines how school leaders experience, interpret, and enact participatory leadership within a regulated public education system. Although participatory leadership is often conceptualized as a redistribution of authority, less is known about how it is experienced and made workable under conditions of institutional regulation and formal accountability. A phenomenology-informed interpretive approach was used to explore the lived experiences of six Lithuanian school leaders engaged in participatory decision-making (PDM). The findings reveal participatory leadership as a lived and continuously negotiated practice situated within a regulated institutional lifeworld shaped by accountability structures, hierarchical relations, political oversight, and institutional timeframes. Within this context, participation was constituted through four interrelated dimensions: normative orientation, leadership agency, selective organizational learning, and relational infrastructure. These dimensions were not uniformly enabling: leaders’ judgments could both expand and delimit participation, organizational learning involved inclusion as well as exclusion, and trust emerged as a fragile relational condition. Based on these findings, the study develops a non-linear interpretive model of participatory leadership as an interdependent and contextually enacted practice. The study contributes to participatory and distributed leadership scholarship by foregrounding how institutional conditions acquire practical meaning through leadership interpretation, judgment, and everyday enactment.