Delegation of Authority and Secondary School Effectiveness in Conflict-Affected Settings: Evidence from Cameroon's South West Region

Abstract

Despite robust international evidence linking distributed leadership to school effectiveness, little empirical research has examined how the delegation of leadership functions operates as a school effectiveness mechanism in post-colonial African educational systems shaped by strong hierarchical governance traditions and ongoing socio-political instability. This article reports original findings from a large-scale explanatory sequential mixed-methods study involving 480 principals and teachers across 30 secondary schools in the Fako Division, South West Region of Cameroon. Using Spearman rank-order correlation and ordinary least squares multiple regression, the study found that delegation of functions is the single strongest predictor of school effectiveness perceptions (rₛ = 0.683, p < 0.001; β = 0.455, p < 0.001, R² = 0.507). Qualitative thematic analysis of 24 in-depth interviews identified three mechanisms through which delegation produces its effects: resolving the institutional bottleneck created by authority concentration; building collective leadership capacity through genuine professional responsibility; and generating psychological empowerment through bounded autonomy. The Anglophone crisis context intensified both the demand for and the value of distributed governance. Findings are theoretically situated within distributed leadership theory (Gronn, 2002; Spillane, 2006) and psychological empowerment theory (Spreitzer et al., 1997), and the concept of contextual amplitude is proposed to account for the especially large delegation effect observed in hierarchical institutional settings.