ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Mental Health and Wellbeing in Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1657492
The impact of university teachers' transformational leadership on students' social-emotional competence: The mediating role of teacher-student relationship and learning engagement with moderated by self-efficacy
Provisionally accepted
- 1Yantai Nanshan University, Longkou, China
- 2Joongbu University, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
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In the context of increasing emphasis on holistic student development in higher education, transformational leadership (TL) demonstrated by university faculty has been linked to positive student outcomes, including social-emotional competence (SEC). This study explored the associations between TL and students' SEC by examining two potential mediating processes—the quality of teacher–student relationships (TSR) and students' learning engagement (LE)—as well as the moderating role of self-efficacy (SE). Survey data were collected from 659 undergraduates at multiple universities in China. Using structural equation modeling (SEM) and moderated mediation analysis (PROCESS Model 7), the findings revealed that TL positively influenced students' SEC through two parallel pathways: by strengthening TSR and enhancing LE. Notably, SE significantly moderated the relationship between TL and TSR, such that the indirect effect of TL on SEC via TSR was stronger among students with higher levels of SE. However, the SE-moderated path via LE was not significant. These results highlight the importance of both relational and motivational processes in leadership-informed pedagogy, and underscore how students' psychological traits such as self-efficacy condition their responsiveness to instructional leadership. Although the cross-sectional design limits causal inference, this study provides initial empirical support for targeted leadership strategies that align with students' individual resources to foster social-emotional development in higher education.
Keywords: Transformational leadership, social-emotional competence, teacher-student relationship, Learning engagement, self-efficacy
Received: 01 Jul 2025; Accepted: 17 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 LIN and WANG. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chunying WANG, Joongbu University, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
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