Empowering leadership and work engagement among university faculty members with affective commitment and perceived insider status as parallel mediators

Abstract Sustaining faculty work engagement is difficult amid competing teaching, research, administrative and student-development demands. Although empowering leadership is linked to engagement, whether this relationship operates through faculty members’ psychological ties to their academic unit remains unclear. Drawing on Conservation of Resources theory, we conceptualized empowering leadership as a contextual resource passageway and examined affective commitment and perceived insider status as parallel mediators. Survey data from 648 full-time faculty members in Jiangxi and Guangdong, China, were analyzed using latent-variable structural equation modeling with bias-corrected bootstrapping. Empowering leadership was positively associated with work engagement. Indirect associations through affective commitment and perceived insider status were significant, while the direct association remained significant, indicating partial mediation. The two indirect effects did not differ significantly. These findings distinguish emotional attachment and perceived organizational inclusion as complementary pathways linking empowering leadership to faculty engagement.