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The typology of school leaders and teachers’ outcomes: a latent profile analysis of paternalistic leadership

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Abstract

Benevolence, morality, and authoritarianism are the three critical dimensions of paternalistic leadership rooted in Chinese cultures and may represent the relation-oriented, values-oriented, and task-oriented leadership styles under the western research framework. Using the person-centered latent profile analysis, this study investigated the profiles of paternalistic school leaders as perceived by teachers in order to determine whether these profiles in educational setting align with theories and evidence obtained from other settings. A total of 653 primary school teachers from Bei**g and 731 primary school teachers from Jilin province participated in this study. The Bei**g sample was used in initial profile identification, while the Jilin sample and the integrated sample were used in profile confirmation. The final results generally supported a 5-profile model, with the five profiles labelled as dictatorial paternalistic leaders, semi-ideological paternalistic leaders, semi-benefactor paternalistic leaders, selfless benefactor paternalistic leaders, and authentic paternalistic leaders, respectively. The automatic BCH approach was then used to estimate and compare the means of distal continuous outcomes across the five latent profiles. The results indicated that when teachers perceived leadership profiles as high in benevolence and morality, they also reported greater work engagement and teacher efficacy. When teachers perceived leadership profiles as high in authoritarianism, they also reported greater emotional exhaustion and turnover intention. Teachers under the leadership of authentic paternalistic leaders reported the highest levels of work engagement and teacher efficacy, as well as the highest levels of emotional exhaustion and turnover intention.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, 518060, China

    Shenghua Huang

  2. Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Hongbiao Yin

  3. School of Construction Engineering, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, 518055, China

    **aodan Li

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  1. Shenghua Huang
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  2. Hongbiao Yin
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  3. **aodan Li
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Correspondence to **aodan Li.

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Conflict of interest

This research is funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (Education, 2022, grant number CHA220293). This article is based on the PhD disseration compeleted by Dr. Shenghua Huang (Huang, 2020). There is no other financial or non-financial interest that are directly or indirectly related to this current work.

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The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual adult participants included in the study.

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Huang, S., Yin, H. & Li, X. The typology of school leaders and teachers’ outcomes: a latent profile analysis of paternalistic leadership. Curr Psychol 43, 20235–20249 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05835-7

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