Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis for validating a distributed leadership inventory for secondary schools in Ethiopia

This study aimed to validate the Ethiopian version of the distributed leadership inventory (DLI-Eth) and evaluate its psychometric properties. The survey was administered to 714 randomly selected teachers. The data were subjected to data cleaning and preliminary analysis for normality and multivariate assumptions using SPSS version 23 with an extension of AMOS. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed to identify the cluster of items and test model fit. The principal component analysis extraction method with varimax rotation revealed a significant four-factor solution. The four-factor structure accounted for 70.04% of the cumulative variance. The results showed that the proposed model met the acceptable model fit. The study concluded that the DLI-Eth is a good tool for measuring distributed leadership functions in Ethiopia. Moreover, this paper makes a practical contribution to future leadership investigators by providing a validated inventory to broaden our understanding of distributed leadership in a non-Western context.