Holding schools together: Leadership as organizational repair under conditions of institutional fragility

Dominant models of school leadership conceptualize effectiveness in terms of improvement, development, and organizational growth, typically assuming institutional stability and sufficient capacity. However, many schools operate under conditions of sustained institutional fragility, characterized by cumulative policy demands, constrained resources, and limited buffering capacity. In such contexts, the central challenge of leadership shifts from enabling improvement to preventing organizational erosion and sustaining coordinated functioning. This study introduces organizational repair as a theoretical lens to examine the relational and emotional work through which leaders stabilize organizational coherence, professional commitment, and coordinated action under continuous strain. A qualitative-dominant mixed-methods multiple-case study was conducted in five public primary schools in Cyprus (n = 124), combining whole-network social network analysis with interviews, observations, and document analysis. The findings demonstrate that leadership under sustained fragility is enacted through three interrelated mechanisms: trust stabilization, emotional containment, and the redistribution of relational labor. These processes sustain capacity maintenance, the preservation of minimal relational coherence and professional commitment necessary for organizational functioning, with distributed leadership emerging as a compensatory response concentrating maintenance work among middle leaders and informal actors. The study re-specifies leadership effectiveness by identifying the boundary conditions under which improvement-oriented frameworks become analytically insufficient, advancing a theoretically distinct and context-sensitive account of leadership under continuous structural strain.