What is Middle Executives

This chapter will provide information on the context of supporting and empowering school leaders in crisis management in the global pandemic crisis. Based on the contextual paradigm of the centralized education system in Cyprus, and in particular on school principals in Cyprus who acted as middle executives, this chapter will provide a guided theoretical perspective on how to lead in school organizations within a centralized education system during crises by focusing on the developmental framework of school leaders' skills capacity. In particular, through collecting evidence from the context of Cyprus during the pandemic crisis, a conceptual framework of empowering school leaders as middle executives is presented and analyzed. This framework could support policy experts on school leaders' professional training and capacity for handling uncertainty and crisis. Also, further empirical research could validate the proposed framework and examine to what extent this framework could be adopted by school leaders in school organizations both in centralized and decentralized education systems.