ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Psychology in Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1664939
Transformational Leadership and Future Work Readiness Among Chinese Vocational College Students: AI Literacy and Career Self-Regulation as Dual Mediators
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universiti Malaya Faculty of Education, Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- 2Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
- 3Xingtai Vocational College of Applied Technology, XingTai, China
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Amid accelerating digital transformation, students in vocational colleges face increasing uncertainty about their future career prospects. Grounded in the Cognitive Appraisal Theory (CAT) and Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), this study proposed and tested a dual-path mediation model in which transformational leadership (TL) in educational settings influenced students' future work readiness (FWR) through two mechanisms: AI literacy and career self-regulation (career control and decision-making difficulties) factors. The structural equation modeling and bootstrapped mediation analyses using data from 697 Chinese vocational college students revealed that TL indirectly enhanced career optimism and reduced future work anxiety through these mediators. Taken together, the findings are consistent with a full-mediation account: indirect effects were significant, and the direct links from TL to CO and to FWA attenuated to non-significance once the mediators were included. The findings positioned AI literacy as a critical cognitive bridge linking educational leadership to vocational psychological outcomes, and extended theoretical models of future work readiness and psychological adaptation to digitally evolving educational contexts.
Keywords: Transformational leadership, AI literacy, Future Work Readiness, Vocational Education, Structural Equation Modeling
Received: 13 Jul 2025; Accepted: 08 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ma, Zhang, Jiang 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: Zehui Ma, mazehui18@gmail.com
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