Revitalising a student-centred leadership: modelling the influence of teacher leadership behaviours on student engagement in higher education

Purpose In recent years, the study of various forms of teacher leadership styles and behaviours, and student engagement has gained increasing attention because these constructs are critical for understanding student success and well-being. However, investigation of how these constructs interact to shape students' learning, particularly in the Ethiopian higher education contexts, remains underexplored. Addressing the gap, the present study examines how teacher leadership behaviours, as conceptualized by the Full-Range Leadership Model (which views leadership as a continuum that includes transformational, transactional and non-leadership behaviours), influence student engagement in Ethiopian public universities. Design/methodology/approach Employing a cross-sectional study design, the study involved 840 undergradute student participants selected through multistage stratified sampling. The data were collected using questionnaires and then analysed through structural equation modelling. Findings The study findings reveal that transformational teacher leadership is strongly and positively associated with student engagement, suggesting that a higher level of student engagement is related to teachers' demonstrating transformational leadership behaviours. Conversely, transactional teacher leadership shows a small negative association with student engagement, highlighting its limitation in promoting the motivation essential for sustained student engagement. Non-leadership teacher behaviours, on the other hand, yield a negligible positive link to student engagement, resulting in a fragile learning environment that is not conducive to sustained engagement. Originality/value Based on the findings, the study suggests practical implications for effective teacher leadership development programs and their associated influences in improving student engagement in higher education. Furthermore, the study's contextual specialization within the Ethiopian public universities setting provides novelty because the majority of earlier teacher leadership and related student outcomes investigations were carried out more in Western and to some extent in Asian higher education settings.