What determines school principals' leadership styles?

School leadership shapes the process at schools and indirectly affects student achievement. For that reason, knowing what characteristics influence educational leadership within schools can be used by principals and school boards to reflect on leadership in their schools and also by local, regional and national governments to create conditions for further enhancing school leadership. This chapter addresses these issues by examining to what extent characteristics of principals and the school context influence educational leadership across countries and economies. First, the chapter focuses on differences between systems with regard to instructional leadership of principals and characteristics that are related to instructional leadership. Then, countries and economies are compared regarding distributed leadership. The last section explores different types of leadership based on principals’ instructional leadership, distributed leadership and their action directed towards the instructional processes at schools.