Transformational Leadership and Teacher Professional Services: Sequential Mediation by Culture and Engagement

Abstract

Transformational leadership is widely assumed to improve teacher professional services directly, but the empirical evidence for this direct path is inconsistent. This study tests a novel explanation for that inconsistency, not previously tested for teacher professional services: that leadership’s influence operates sequentially, through organizational culture and then employee engagement, rather than directly. A quantitative explanatory survey of 321 certified senior high school teachers across four regencies of Banten Province, Indonesia, was analyzed with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), comparing two specifications on the same dataset: a baseline model treating leadership and culture as parallel, competing predictors, and a sequential model repositioning leadership as culture’s antecedent. In the baseline model, neither leadership (β = 0.022, p = .721) nor culture (β = 0.135, p = .224) predicted professional services directly; only engagement did (β = 0.541, p < .001). In the sequential model, leadership strongly predicted culture (β = 0.790), culture predicted engagement (β = 0.720), and engagement predicted professional services (β = 0.652), yielding a significant indirect effect of leadership on professional services through the full chain (β = 0.371, p < .001). These results indicate that transformational leadership’s influence on teacher professional services is better explained as channelled through culture and engagement than as absent. Leadership development should therefore be evaluated as culture-building work, with engagement treated as a prerequisite investment rather than a by-product.