Teacher leadership and teacher-perceived student academic engagement in higher education: The roles of teacher motivation and school culture

Teacher leadership is increasingly recognised as a source of instructional and organisational improvement in higher education, yet its association with student-facing classroom processes remains underexamined. Drawing on Distributed Leadership Theory and research on teacher work motivation, this study examined the association between teacher leadership and teacher-perceived student academic engagement, the statistical indirect role of teacher motivation, and the moderating role of reported school culture. Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 1032 full-time academic staff across three higher education institutions in Hubei Province, China. Structural equation modelling indicated that teacher leadership was positively associated with teacher-perceived student academic engagement and that a positive indirect association was observed through aggregate teacher work-task motivation. Hierarchical regression further showed that the association was slightly stronger among teachers reporting a more supportive school culture, although the additional explanatory contribution was small. Exploratory discipline-specific analyses revealed positive associations across all five disciplinary groups, although numerical differences in the estimated coefficients were not formally tested for between-group significance. These findings extend distributed leadership research by connecting teacher leadership with teacher-reported engagement-related classroom processes and by identifying teacher motivation and reported school culture as relevant motivational and contextual conditions in higher education.