Multivariate modeling of organizational dynamics and faculty well-being in higher education.

BACKGROUND: Leadership styles are increasingly recognised as strategic organizational resources for faculty well-being, yet the evidence remains fragmented: prior studies have examined leadership, workplace harassment-systematic, recurrent negative acts that constrain the target's capacity for self-defence-and psychological resources in isolation, and rarely within a single explanatory model. Whether these processes operate equivalently for male and female faculty has been largely untested, despite its direct relevance for equitable university management. AIM: To test an integrated structural model relating transformational and servant leadership to workplace harassment, teacher self-efficacy, and life satisfaction among Peruvian university teachers; to formally test the mediating role of self-efficacy against directly estimated residual effects; and to examine whether the structural relations differ by gender. DESIGN: A quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional study with explanatory scope. PARTICIPANTS: 506 university teachers from Peru (49.6% men, 50.4% women; 61.66% from public institutions). METHODS: Structural Equation Modelling with robust WLSMV estimation on ordinal indicators, including directly estimated residual paths from both leadership styles to life satisfaction. Indirect effects were evaluated with the product-of-coefficients method and bootstrap bias-corrected accelerated confidence intervals ( B =5000 ; ML sensitivity analysis). Measurement invariance across gender was tested with a configural-metric-scalar (threshold) sequence under WLSMV, and structural gender differences were assessed with a formal likelihood-ratio comparison of free versus constrained multigroup models, followed by Wald tests of path differences. Robustness to age, university type, and region was verified through a covariate-adjusted sensitivity model. RESULTS: Both transformational ( β = - 0.123 , p 0.01 ) and servant ( β = - 0.186 , p 0.001 ) leadership were negatively associated with workplace harassment. Servant leadership showed the strongest effect on self-efficacy ( β =0.505 , p 0.001 ), which in turn predicted life satisfaction ( β =0.429 , p 0.001 ; R 2 =0.393 ). Servant leadership exhibited complementary partial mediation: both its indirect effect via self-efficacy ( β std =0.217 , BCa CI [ 0.146 , 0.354 ] ) and its direct residual effect ( β =0.251 , BCa CI [0.198, 0.597] ) were significant. Transformational leadership showed a small indirect-only effect ( β std =0.033 , BCa CI [ 0.003 , 0.101 ] ) with a non-significant direct path. Serial paths through harassment were not significant. Measurement invariance across gender was supported ( Δ CFI ≤ 0.003 at every step), licensing structural comparison; full structural equivalence was rejected ( Δ χ 2 (8)=17.86 , p =0.022 ), with Wald tests localising the differences exclusively to the transformational-leadership paths: its protective effect against harassment operated among women ( β = - 0.238 , p 0.001 ) but not men ( β = - 0.022 , n.s.), whereas its effect on self-efficacy operated among men ( β =0.157 , p 0.05 ) but not women ( β = - 0.024 , n.s.). All conclusions were robust to age, university type, and region (all | Δ β | ≤ 0.012 ). CONCLUSION: Servant leadership functions as a gender-equivalent organisational resource for faculty well-being, whereas transformational leadership operates through gender-specific pathways-protecting women against workplace harassment and strengthening men's efficacy beliefs. These findings provide differentiated, data-driven guidance for university management aligned with Sustainable Development Goals 5 (gender equality) and 16 (just institutions), indicating that leadership development must be gender-responsive rather than uniform.