Policy-makers and the public are demanding information about how countries’ educational Policy-makers and the public are demanding information about how countries’ educational systems and schools improve school outcomes as well as ensuring student achievement. They have started to pay attention to national and international exams in measuring student success and making comparisons among countries to see the whole picture of their country in education. In this context, we will discuss cultural, and societal contexts and their influence on various leadership roles (distributed, instructional, transactional and transformational leadership styles), behaviors, and practices. Then, we will provide a map of how the distribution of school leadership is in seven countries (Finland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, Turkey, and USA). Finally, we will debate what differences among the leadership styles of seven countries. For this purpose, we used cluster analysis technique. Participants consisted of 1166 school principals in lower secondary schools (ISCED 2) in seven countries. We find out the distribution of distributed leadership in Cluster 1 and it consists mostly of Turkish, American and Finnish principals, respectively. In other words, we implied that Turkish, American and Finnish school principals have similar aspects in this Cluster 1. In Clusters 2, Turkish, Korean, American and Swedish school principals have similar characteristics. Especially, Korean and Turkish school principals are come forward. In Cluster 3, we have the distribution of Swedish and Singaporean school principals is similar. Cluster 4 shows that the largest portion is belonging to Japanese principals. To sum up, the study expressed that leadership styles in different countries clustered in various ways because of individual, national and international cultural and social values. For this reason, we recommended that beyond the leadership styles of countries, researchers should also focus on individual, national and international cultural and social codes.

Distributed leadership, instructional leadership, transactional leadership, transformational leadership, TALIS 2018.