From leadership research to district action: Perceived charismatic leadership and work engagement among higher education teachers: differential indirect associations through professional efficacy, belonging, and values

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Introduction Positive leadership is frequently associated with work engagement, but it remains unclear whether teachers’ perceptions of displayed charismatic leadership behaviors are directly associated with engagement or are linked to it through distinct professional resources. This study examined the indirect associations connecting perceived charismatic leadership with teachers’ work engagement through professional efficacy, professional belonging, and professional values. Methods A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted with 248 higher education teachers recruited through convenience sampling in Shandong Province, China. The measurement items were adapted from established scales and localized through translation or wording review, expert review, pilot testing, and revision. Confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and bootstrap analysis of specific indirect associations were used to evaluate the proposed model. Results Perceived charismatic leadership was positively associated with professional efficacy and professional values but was not uniquely associated with work engagement or professional belonging in the structural model. Professional efficacy and professional values were positively associated with work engagement and yielded significant specific indirect associations between perceived charismatic leadership and work engagement. The corresponding indirect association through professional belonging was not significant. Discussion The pattern is consistent with the proposition that perceived charismatic leadership is related to teachers’ work engagement primarily through capability- and meaning-related professional resources. Because the data are cross-sectional and based on adapted self-report measures, the estimates should not be interpreted as evidence of temporal or causal mediation. Subject to longitudinal confirmation, higher education leaders may benefit from pairing inspirational communication with concrete support for capability development and credible professional-purpose formation.

Study methods

This study adopted a quantitative, cross-sectional correlational survey design to examine associations among perceived charismatic leadership, professional efficacy, professional belonging, professional values, and work engagement among higher education teachers. The design permitted estimation of relationships among latent constructs and comparison of theoretically distinct specific indirect associations within one model. It did not permit verification of temporal precedence or causal mediation.

Limitations

First, the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference and does not establish the temporal ordering required for mediation. The proposed leadership-to-resource-to-engagement sequence is theoretically specified, whereas the data show only a covariance pattern consistent with that sequence. Reverse and reciprocal explanations remain plausible: engaged teachers may evaluate leaders more positively, engagement may strengthen professional confidence and value affirmation, and professional resources may shape leadership perceptions. Multi-wave, diary, cross-lagged, or experimental studies are required to compare these orderings.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Yan Cheng; Junzhang Han; Haibo Liu. Perceived charismatic leadership and work engagement among higher education teachers: differential indirect associations through professional efficacy, belonging, and values. Frontiers in Psychology (2026-09-10). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1956141

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.