The purpose of this article was to examine the effects of distributed leadership on instructional change and school climate by integrating the functional and relational perspectives of leadership. The functional perspective focuses on the degree to which leadership functions are equally distributed among leaders, and the relational perspective emphasizes the frequency of leader-leader interaction and leader-teacher interaction. By examining longitudinal and multilevel data on 109 elementary schools across 15 states in the United States, I found both separate and interactive effects of the 2 perspectives of distributed leadership. Direct effects were found only for leader-leader interaction. However, both leader-leader interaction and leader-teacher interaction were found to reinforce the positive effects of equality of distributed leadership functions, although such effects varied across the 2 outcomes.
