The Charismatic Aspects of Transformational Leadership and their Prediction of the University teacher’s Work Engagement: the Mediating Effect of Trust in Leaders

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigates the effect that idealized influence and inspirational motivation of transformational leadership on work engagement of university teacher and the mediating role of trust in leaders between the relationships. 
 
 Theoretical framework: Job-Demand Resources Model (JD-R) and Social Exchange Theory (SET) were adopted in this study.
 
 Design/methodology/approach: The study population is the university teachers in seven public universities in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China. The unit of analysis of this study is the individual university teacher from these seven public universities. With a stratified sampling and a cross-sectional design, 381 respondents are employed in the study for data collection by self-report questionnaires and the data is analyzed by Amos with structural equation modeling.
 
 Findings: The findings indicate that idealised influence has a positive effect on teachers' work engagement, inspirational motivation has a positive effect on teachers' work engagement, and teachers' trust in leaders mediates the relationship between idealised influence and teacher's work engagement, inspirational motivation, and teacher's work engagement.
 
 Research, Practical & Social implications: This study will be beneficial for future researchers and university administrative to aware the importance of trust in leaders in the workplace to improve the work engagement. Meanwhile, more psychological factors like psychological safety or psychological fulfillment on work engagement should be explored and tested. This finding also provides solutions to the improvement of teachers’ work engagement from a charismatic perspective of leadership to those universities located in less developed cities of China and the world. Leaders’ Charm matters and should be improved and make best use of it.
 
 Originality/value: The study provides valuable insight on the effect of charismatic aspects of transformational leadership on work engagement by introducing a phycological factor, trust in leaders, as a mediator between the relationship and providing a new perspective of illustration and reason by considering idealized influence and inspirational motivation as job resources.