TEACHERPRENEURSHIP AS A META-SKILL FOR TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP: CONCEPTUALIZATION AND VALIDATION

Abstract

Chinese private higher education institutions (HEIs) face market–policy pressures requiring rapid innovation and leadership enactment beyond formal roles. This study tests whether teacherpreneurship can be conceptualized and validated as a leadership-enabling meta-skill bundle (TEB–MS) that strengthens transformational leadership (TL) behaviors and predicts work performance, knowledge-sharing/communities-of-practice engagement, and career adaptability/success. This study contributes by conceptualizing teacherpreneurship as a higher-order meta-skill construct that integrates adaptive, relational, creative, and strategic capabilities within a unified leadership-enabling framework. Using a time-lagged validation design with faculty and academic staff from multiple Chinese private HEIs (N = 654), TEB–MS was modeled as a second-order construct comprising adaptive expertise/learning agility, relational dynamics, creative agility, and strategic synthesis, and evaluated using CFA and SEM. CFA supported the second-order structure. TEB–MS predicted TL (β = .52, p < .001), TL predicted outcomes (β = .54, p < .001), and the indirect effect was substantial (β = .28, p < .001) with partial mediation (direct β = .10, p < .05). Academic management support and distributed leadership/empowerment climate strengthened the TEB–MS → TL relationship. These findings suggest that private HEIs should strengthen both faculty capability development and enabling academic management conditions if they aim to convert teacher initiative into visible transformational leadership and institutional improvement.