Narrative leadership in a quality organization: a meaningful alternative to management by measurement

In the wake of teacher evaluation and performance pay legislation in the USA, an unprecedented cheating scandal in the Atlanta Public School System, and similar smaller testing scandals elsewhere, the effectiveness of school improvement models based on measuring standardized testing results is now a concern. This article addresses this concern by building on research that describes a successful accreditation approach using storytelling in a school-wide portfolio framework. The evaluation of this relational approach to accreditation laid the foundation for this examination of an organizational semiotic model of narrative leadership. In this study, I answer two overarching research questions: (1) how does a story construct narrative leadership? and (2) how does narrative leadership socially construct a quality organization through storytelling? This investigation validates narrative leadership as an effective alternative to the management-by-measurement approach to school improvement and as a way to construct quality organizations for the twenty-first century.