Empowering School Leaders as Middle Executives in the Centralized Education System of Cyprus

Introduction

Millions of individuals around the world have been distracted by the COVID-19 virus, which has caused disruption in their lives. The travel sector, enterprises, and economies have all suffered serious consequences as a result of the worldwide lockdown restrictions (Kafa & Pashiardis, 2020). In general, modern societies are in the midst of a “perfect storm”, which includes issues such as the global financial crisis, the worldwide climate crisis, and the global poverty crisis, all of which have an impact on people's lives when they are confronted with these “unknown unknowns” (Shrivastava et al., 2013; Ansell & Boin, 2019). As a result, the unprecedented arrival of the “invisible” enemy, known as COVID-19, once again brought the concept of crisis to the forefront, affecting all sectors and societies of humanity.

In particular, concerning the organizational aspect, the pandemic crisis brought various problems to organizations, such as financial problems, management problems, as well as insecurity for the employees. Furthermore, this crisis disrupted the normal operation of organizations since an immediate response is required in such cases (Fener & Cevik, 2015). Specifically, the COVID-19 crisis, besides the health crisis, also affected the economic and social aspects of organizations (Bartsch et al., 2021). Calogero and Yasin (2011) argued that due a crisis the overall operating level within an organization is changing since it affects everyone inside the organization. Therefore, during a crisis, specific initiatives and measures must be considered even if organizations are lacking time to prepare in advance (Bhaduri, 2019). In general, any crisis, including COVID-19, triggers a period of uncertainty in organizations. As a consequence, the need to redesign and redefine processes and procedures is more visible than ever, since everything changes.

Having said that, the crisis of COVID-19 triggered uncertainty in all educational organizations, including school organizations (both in primary and secondary education) and higher educational organizations that were not prepared in advance to address the crisis, and overall change the educational landscape across the various contexts. Specifically, in school organizations, this crisis affected more than one billion students and learners in more than 200 countries (Pokhler & Chhetri, 2021; UNESCO, 2020) and disrupted the way in which these learners were educated, since the concepts of teaching and learning were re-designed and dramatically altered (Harris, 2020). In particular, the learning process was redesigned since online and distance learning were imposed and brought changes in the educational processes. This particular change affected all school teachers who undertook the difficult task of transforming their conventional teaching into a distance teaching, through an online environment, and at the same time revealed how unprepared all the education systems were in terms of infrastructure and staff training. Research studies, indicated that teachers faced many challenges and pressure (Walls & Seashore, 2021), such as various complexities of meeting students’ needs remotely and the overall adjustment to these new circumstances, while maintaining high academic expectations (Burgin, Daniel & Wasonga, 2021).