The Human Perspective: Subjective Models in Educational Leadership

Walk into any school and you’ll quickly notice something that no organizational chart can capture: two teachers can experience the same staff meeting in entirely different ways, a principal’s decision that seems fair to one parent may feel exclusionary to another, and a new policy rolled out by the administration may mean one thing to department heads and something entirely different to classroom teachers. This is precisely what subjective models of educational management are built to explain. Rather than treating a school or college as a machine with predictable inputs and outputs, these models recognize that every person within an institution carries their own lens – shaped by values, background, and lived experience – through which they interpret what is happening around them. Understanding this human dimension is not just philosophically interesting; it is essential for anyone who wants to lead an educational institution effectively.

What are subjective models of educational management? 🔗

To appreciate subjective models, it helps to know what they are reacting against. For much of the twentieth century, educational management was dominated by formal or systems theories – approaches that treated schools as structured organizations with shared goals, clear hierarchies, and predictable behaviours. According to Bush (2003), these formal models presented organizations as concrete realities with a life of their own, independent of the people within them.

The challenge to this view came most forcefully from Canadian scholar Thomas Greenfield, whose influential work in the 1970s and 1980s fundamentally reoriented thinking in this field. Greenfield argued that conventional theories grossly simplify organizational reality by treating institutions as single entities with unified purposes. He insisted instead that organizations are not objective structures but social constructions – they exist only in the minds and experiences of the people within them.

Subjective models assume that organizations are the creations of the people within them, and that participants interpret situations in different ways based on their individual backgrounds and values. Put simply: the same school means something different to each person who works or studies there. There is no single, objective “school” – there are as many versions of it as there are people experiencing it.

Organizations as personal experiences 🔗

One of the most striking claims of subjective models is that organizations are social constructions that emerge from the interaction of their participants – they are manifestations of the values and beliefs of individuals rather than the concrete realities presented in formal models. This is a direct departure from the idea that a school or university exists as a fixed, objective entity.

What does this mean in practice? Consider a new attendance policy introduced by a school administration. A vice-principal who has managed discipline issues for years may see it as a much-needed tool for accountability. A class teacher who values relationships with students may experience the same policy as a barrier to pastoral care. A parent from a marginalized community may interpret it as another mechanism of institutional control. None of these readings is simply “wrong” – each reflects a genuine lived experience of the same institutional event.

Subjective models are concerned with the meanings placed on events by people within organizations. The focus is on individual interpretation of behaviour rather than the situations and actions themselves. Bolman and Deal (1991) note that the same events can carry very different meanings for different people because of differences in how individuals interpret their experience.

Structure as a product of human interaction 🔗

Another important feature of this approach is how it treats organizational structure. Subjective models treat structure as a product of human interaction rather than something fixed or predetermined. The organizational charts that feature in formal management – showing who reports to whom – are regarded as insufficient because they cannot predict or explain how individuals actually behave. Behaviour in an institution, subjective theorists argue, reflects the personal qualities and aspirations of its members far more than the roles they officially occupy.

This also reframes the concept of organizational goals. Subjective approaches emphasize the significance of individual purposes and deny the existence of unified organizational goals. Greenfield pointedly asked what kind of thing an organization could possibly be that it can possess goals of its own. Goals, in this view, are always the goals of individuals – leaders, teachers, parents, students – pursued through the institution, not by it.

The influence of personal beliefs and values on leadership 🔗

If organizations are shaped by individual experience, then the values and beliefs of those in leadership positions carry enormous weight. From Greenfield’s perspective, educational leaders are, in essence, creators of social reality. Educational management and leadership are ethical activities – in a world where organizations are concerned with value judgments, leaders attempt to commit others to the values they themselves believe in, becoming what Greenfield called “value entrepreneurs.”

This idea has concrete implications. A school principal who deeply values student-centred learning will steer pedagogical decisions, resource allocation, and even staff hiring toward approaches that personalize learning. A leader who places greater weight on academic rigour and standardized outcomes will shape the same institution into a markedly different environment. Neither leader is acting irrationally – both are operating from a genuine value system. But the institutional experience for everyone inside that school will differ substantially.

Subjective theorists prefer to stress the personal qualities of individuals rather than their official positions in the organization. Leadership, in this view, is a product of personal qualities and skills, not simply an automatic outcome of official authority. This challenges the assumption that whoever holds the title of “head teacher” or “principal” automatically possesses the kind of authority or influence that formal models predict.

Leadership style as a value expression 🔗

The connection between personal values and leadership style is direct. A leader whose formative experiences taught them the importance of collaboration will gravitate toward participatory decision-making. One whose background emphasized hierarchy and accountability may lean toward more directive approaches. Postmodern and emotional leadership styles align closely with the subjective model, emphasizing diversity, multiple interpretations, and the importance of individual emotions in decision-making.

This also means that staff shape management outcomes – not just leaders. A department head who believes teachers work best with professional autonomy will foster a very different team culture than one who believes in close supervision. A counsellor whose own schooling was marked by feeling unheard will likely advocate loudly for student voice in institutional decisions. Subjective models have close links with postmodern leadership, where leaders need to attend to multiple voices in their organizations and develop a “power to” rather than a “power over” model of leadership.

Relevance in educational institutions: addressing diverse stakeholder perspectives 🔗

Schools and colleges are among the most complex organizations in any society precisely because they bring together stakeholders with widely varying – sometimes competing – personal perspectives. Students, parents, teachers, non-teaching staff, governors, and community members all inhabit the same institution, yet their experiences of it, and what they want from it, can differ dramatically.

Subjective models are uniquely equipped to account for this reality. The path to understanding schools and their administration lies with the interpretation and analysis of the experience of people in these institutions, rather than in the use of overarching management theories. In other words, a leader who wants to understand why a policy is failing cannot simply examine the policy in the abstract – they need to examine how different people within the institution are experiencing it.

Research published in Kappan reinforces this point: regardless of how well-designed a policy is, stakeholders will interpret – and therefore implement – it in different ways. This is not resistance or incompetence; it is the natural consequence of individuals bringing their own frameworks of meaning to institutional life.

When individual interpretations cluster into institutional culture 🔗

An important nuance is that subjective models do not imply that every person in an institution operates in complete isolation. In practice, individual meanings tend to cluster into patterns, which do enable participants and observers to make valid generalizations about organizations. Over time, the shared – yet individually constructed – meanings of an institution’s members coalesce into what we call institutional culture. This is why two schools in the same city, operating under identical regulations, can feel like entirely different places.

The skillful school leader is able to harness many individual subjective interpretations so that school staff are largely united behind a common educational vision. This is one of the most practical insights the subjective model offers: leadership is not about imposing a pre-formed vision, but about building shared meaning among people who arrive with very different personal frameworks.

Implications for inclusive management practice 🔗

A study on distributed leadership published in ScienceDirect found that effective educational leadership requires acknowledging the expertise and agency of stakeholders across all organizational tiers – teachers, support staff, students, and parents alike. This is entirely consistent with the subjective model’s insistence that management cannot be reduced to directives from the top; it must account for the meanings and motivations of everyone involved.

For educational managers, this means creating spaces where diverse voices are genuinely heard, not merely consulted for appearances. Diversity of perspectives, when managed well, becomes a source of institutional strength rather than a source of friction – stakeholders with varied backgrounds surface blind spots, challenge assumptions, and ensure that institutional decisions are grounded in the actual experience of those they are meant to serve.

Limitations worth acknowledging 🔗

Subjective models have made an enduring contribution to how we think about educational organizations, but they are not without criticism. Subjective models provide few clear guidelines for managerial action – leaders are expected to acknowledge individual meanings placed on events, but this stance is much less prescriptive than the guidance formal models offer. Critics also argue that by focusing so heavily on the individual, the model struggles to account for collective structures and institutional patterns that shape behaviour in ways individuals may not even be aware of.

There is also the practical concern that the subjective approach works only if leaders genuinely wish it to work – a fragile basis for institutional management. If a leader is unwilling to engage with the diverse and sometimes uncomfortable meanings that staff and students attach to institutional life, the model offers little by way of a corrective mechanism.

For these reasons, most contemporary educational management thinking positions subjective models not as a replacement for formal structures, but as a necessary complement to them. The formal model provides the scaffold; the subjective model ensures that the human beings within that scaffold are seen, heard, and understood. The most useful insight from this tradition is that leaders should respect and give attention to the diverse and individual perspectives of stakeholders, rather than relying solely on hierarchy.

Bringing it all together 🔗

Subjective models remind educational leaders of something that is easy to forget in the day-to-day pressures of running an institution: every person in a school or college is not just an occupant of a role, but a meaning-maker. Teachers do not simply deliver lessons – they interpret their professional identity, their institution, and their students through a deeply personal lens. Principals do not simply execute policy – they enact a value system that shapes everything from the tone of staff meetings to the priorities embedded in budgets. Students do not simply attend school – they experience it through the lens of their backgrounds, expectations, and prior encounters with education.

Acknowledging this complexity does not make the job of leadership harder – it makes it more honest. Leaders who understand that their own values shape management outcomes, and that their staff and students inhabit meaningfully different versions of the same institution, are far better placed to build the kind of trust and shared purpose that drives genuine institutional improvement. In the end, the most effective educational leaders are those who can hold formal structure and human subjectivity together – neither ignoring the systems that make institutions function, nor forgetting that those systems are always, ultimately, made of people.

What do you think? If every individual in a school interprets institutional events through their own personal lens, how can educational leaders build a genuinely shared sense of purpose without overriding the diverse perspectives that make institutions richer? And to what extent should a leader’s personal values openly inform their management decisions – or should there be boundaries between personal belief and professional practice?

References

1. https://www.opentextbooks.org.hk/ditatopic/17933
2. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1066693.pdf
3. https://selmj.ir/article-1-45-en.html
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300048835_Theories_of_Educational_Management_and_Leadership_A_Review
5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328778845_A_Subjectivist_Model_of_School_Leadership_for_International_Schools_Greenfield_Revisited
6. https://kappanonline.org/stosich-bae-engaging-diverse-stakeholders-strengthen-policy/
7. https://www.opentextbooks.org.hk/ditatopic/18152
8. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590291124000329
9. https://www.notion4teachers.com/blog/stakeholder-engagement-in-schools
10. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/id/eprint/5119/14/dok217-eng-School_Leadership_Concepts_and_Evidence_Redacted.pdf