‘Keeping it real’ authentic instructor-leadership, student engagement and performance, and leader distance

ABSTRACT

In higher education teaching, a leadership lens is used to conceptualize teaching quality as ‘instructor-leadership’. Instructor-leadership research has largely focused on transactional and transformational leadership. But, increasing student distress along with the existence of mediocrity and abusiveness in higher education teaching warrants the study of authentic instructor-leadership. The aims of this study are to show that (a) authentic instructor-leadership is related to students’ academic performance via the mechanism of student engagement and (b) leader distance moderates the relationship between authentic instructor-leadership and student engagement. The proposed moderated mediation model was tested using 620 undergraduate students from a university located in Trinidad. Using structural equation modeling, the findings supported student engagement as a partial mediator and leader distance as a moderator. This study contributes to leadership and education by (a) investigating a timely form of instructor-leadership that shifts the field toward morality in teaching, (b) identifying a key mechanism in authentic leadership research, and (c) empirically examining the role of leader distance while providing a novel and conceptually sound approach to doing so. Unexpected findings, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed. Recommendations are outlined for self-evaluation and behavioral training.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Note that low levels of engagement do not necessarily mean ‘disengagement’. Student ‘disengagement’ is a more severe form of withdrawal (see Balwant, 2017b for further discussion of the differences between student engagement and disengagement).

2. The reliability of the balanced processing subscale could be considerably improved by deleting one of its items. Deleting this item would increase Cronbach’s alpha from 0.64 to 0.76. In the upcoming CFA analyses, this item was also problematic, and was thus deleted then.

3. The JEQ was adapted to the course context as recommended by Balwant (2017b) because this measure is well-aligned with the meaning of student engagement as explained in the present paper. Note that recent studies have adopted a similar approach (e.g. Burch et al., 2017).

4. One item was deleted from the original scale because the item was extremely problematic in terms of its reliability.

5. The Bogardus Social Distance Scale consists of 8 total items, but one of these items loaded poorly in Balwant’s (2019) study. In a separate analysis, the same item loaded poorly for the present study’s data, and thus was not used.

6. For frequency of interactions, the items were coded so that higher scores represented higher frequency of interactions instead of higher distance. This coding was better suited for creating the eight leader distance typologies because it was aligned with Antonakis and Atwater’s (2002) descriptions of the typologies as shown in Table 1.

7. The grading system at the university was as follows: A+ = 90–100, A = 80–89, A- = 75–79, B+ = 70–74, B = 65–69, B- = 60–64, C+ = 55–59, C = 50–54, F = 0–49.

8. A few cases of incorrect grade percentages were confirmed for one of the author’s own courses in which the grades entered in the survey were far below the lowest grade for the course.

9. Note that a chi-square difference test was not significant (Satorra-Bentler ${\chi }_{difference}^2$ [7] = 11.71, $CD$ =  .85, $p$ =  0.11). But, the chi-square test is highly sensitive to sample size, and thus not ideal for model comparisons when the sample size is large (Cheung & Rensvold, 2002; Meade et al., 2008).

10. Although authenticity in teaching has been examined by few researchers (e.g. Cranton, 2006; Downing, 2016), there are no studies that explicitly examined the concept of authentic leadership in teaching.

11. In a separate analysis, a combination of the residual centering and product indicator approaches was used to test the proposed moderator effect using the degree of overall leader distance in the structural model (Henseler & Chin, 2010; Steinmetz, Davidov, & Schmidt, 2011). That analysis revealed no significant moderator effect, and thus seems to mask the effect of the intricate leader distance patterns proposed by Antonakis and Atwater (2002).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul T. Balwant

Paul T. Balwant is a Lecturer at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. He presently lectures undergraduate and postgraduate courses on organizational behavior, leadership, and human resource management topics. Paul was awarded a PhD in Management from The University of Sheffield in 2016, and has been the recipient of prestigious scholarships for his undergraduate and doctoral studies. Paul has also received an award from the Academy of Management for his research on instructor-leadership, and a university award for teaching excellence. His research interests include leadership, engagement, and well-being.