Empowering leadership and work engagement among university faculty members with affective commitment and perceived insider status as parallel mediators

Sustaining faculty work engagement is difficult amid competing teaching, research, administrative and student-development demands. Although empowering leadership is linked to engagement, whether this relationship operates through faculty members’ psychological ties to their academic unit remains unclear. Drawing on Conservation of Resources theory, we conceptualized empowering leadership as a contextual resource passageway and examined affective commitment and perceived insider status as parallel mediators.

Survey data from 648 full-time faculty members in Jiangxi and Guangdong, China, were analyzed using latent-variable structural equation modeling with bias-corrected bootstrapping. Empowering leadership was positively associated with work engagement. Indirect associations through affective commitment and perceived insider status were significant, while the direct association remained significant, indicating partial mediation.

The two indirect effects did not differ significantly. These findings distinguish emotional attachment and perceived organizational inclusion as complementary pathways linking empowering leadership to faculty engagement. This work was supported by Guangzhou Municipal Education Bureau and Guangzhou University (Grant No. 2024YBJG013).

School of Physical Education, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China School of Educational Science, Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China The authors declare no competing interests. Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of Guangzhou University. All procedures involving human participants in this study complied with the ethical standards of the relevant institutional and/or national research committees, as well as the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its subsequent amendments or equivalent ethical guidelines.

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