The relationship between paternalistic leadership and work engagement of medical university teachers: the mediating role of self-efficacy

This study aims to explore the relationships among paternalistic leadership, self-efficacy and work engagement among teachers in medical universities, with a focus on the mediating role of self-efficacy. Six hundred and fifty teachers were randomly selected from three medical universities and completed three validated scales: the Paternalistic Leadership Scale, the General Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Work Engagement Scale, and 606 valid questionnaires were collected (93.23% response rate). Pearson correlation, CFA, SEM, ML and Bootstrap method were employed with SPSS 28.0 and AMOS 28.0 software to verify the hypotheses proposed in this study. The results revealed that paternalistic leadership significantly positively influenced work engagement (β = 0.550, p < 0.01) and self-efficacy (β = 0.525, p < 0.01). Moreover, self-efficacy not only positively predicted work engagement (β = 0.601, p < 0.01) but also mediated the relationship between paternalistic leadership and work engagement. These findings highlight that enhancing specific dimensions of paternalistic leadership and fostering teachers' self-efficacy are effective strategies for improving teachers' work engagement in medical education contexts.