LEADING UNDER REFORM PRESSURE: TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND LECTURERS’ PERCEIVED ORGANIZATIONAL CLIMATE IN CHONGQING PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

Chinese public universities face simultaneous demands for teaching quality, research innovation, talent development, and regional service. Academic leaders translate these expectations into lecturers’ everyday work through policy interpretation, resource allocation, workload coordination, and communication of institutional priorities. Drawing on transformational leadership theory, organizational climate theory, and a leadership-as-institutional-signaling perspective, this study examines the association between perceived transformational academic leadership and perceived organizational climate. Cross-sectional questionnaire data were collected from 653 full-time lecturers across five public universities in Chongqing, China. Confirmatory factor analysis supported higher-order representations of both constructs. The structural model showed excellent fit, χ²(1164) = 1163.712, p = .497, CFI = 1.000, TLI = 1.000, and RMSEA = .000. Transformational leadership was positively associated with perceived organizational climate (B = .449, SE = .046, β = .494, p < .001) and explained 24.4% of its variance. A 5,000-resample bias-corrected bootstrap yielded a 95% CI for the standardized coefficient of [.436, .548]. The findings suggest that academic leaders provide visible cues about institutional priorities and practices, while the cross-sectional, single-source design limits causal interpretation. The study contributes multi-institutional evidence from western China.