Inclusive leadership and career sustainability for Teachers in Higher Education Institutions: The mediation role of intellectual stimulation

Abstract

This study examines the role of inclusive leadership in fostering career sustainability of faculty members in higher education institutions (HEIs) of KP, Pakistan. The study examines the role of intellectual stimulation as a mediator. In this study, quantitative and cross sectional survey design, which are based on the positivist epistemological approach, was used. Self-administered and structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 333 teachers of HEIs in KP (Pakistan). The items were all anchored with a five-point Likert scale. The analyses to test the hypothetical relationships were carried out in IBM SPSS. The findings revealed that inclusive leadership has significant positive direct effect on teachers' career sustainability, demonstrating that inclusive leadership builds the psychological and social environment for faculty to sustain meaningful, long-term career paths. Inclusive leadership was also highly predictive of intellectual stimulation, suggesting a cognitive pathway for how inclusive leadership can stimulate faculty learning, critical inquiry and creative problem solving. Intellectual stimulation, in turn, had a large impact on predicting career sustainability. Intellectual stimulation was found to partially mediate the relationship between inclusive leadership and career sustainability. This study makes a contribution to the existing literature by introducing a leadership-cognitive pathway based on the theory of transformational leadership. First, it extends the existing mediation models focusing mainly on career success in the workplace and feedback from developmental leaders by adding a leadership-cognitive pathway based on the theory of transformational leadership. Second, it brings the linkage between inclusive leadership and career sustainability into the perspective of the current scenario of Higher Education (HE) in developing countries, a topic that barely appears in the international literature on career sustainability.