From ‘meant to be’ to ‘passionate to be’: the roles of calling, transformational leadership, and self-efficacy in teacher work engagement

Work engagement is essential for teachers’ well-being and performance, yet its drivers remain underexplored. This study applies the Work as Calling Theory to examine the relationship between calling and transformational leadership with work engagement and the mediating effect of self-efficacy. Adopting a quantitative, cross-sectional design, we collected self-reported Likert-scale survey data from 924 in-service teachers in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. Structural equation modeling and bootstrapping procedures were then employed to analyze these data. The findings highlight the significance of teachers’ calling, an intrinsic career motivation, as critical to their work engagement. Among dimensions of transformational leadership, intellectual stimulation showed the most significant effect on teacher work engagement. Teacher self-efficacy was confirmed to be a critical affordance for teachers to live their calling in the working context.