Perceived principals' aesthetic leadership and teacher professional development: the roles of aesthetic experience and psychological empowerment among Chinese high school teachers.

Aesthetic leadership emphasizes the experiential dimensions of leadership processes, including sensory engagement, emotion, embodied presence, and symbolic expression. Its focus differs from that of transformational leadership, which primarily emphasizes visionary inspiration, and from school climate research, which centers on shared perceptions of the organizational environment. However, although emerging evidence has linked perceived principals' aesthetic leadership with teacher professional development in Chinese high schools, the experiential processes and psychological boundary conditions underlying this association remain insufficiently understood. In China's highly structured school governance context, where principals play a central role in interpreting policy and organizing teachers' work, aesthetic leadership may be especially relevant because it addresses how leadership is experienced emotionally and symbolically in everyday school life. Using cross-sectional self-report questionnaire data from 611 high school teachers in Hainan Province, China, this study examined the association between perceived principals' aesthetic leadership (AL) and teacher professional development (TPD), the statistical indirect role of aesthetic experience (AE), and the conditional role of psychological empowerment (PE). AMOS was used to examine the latent-variable mediation relationship, while SPSS PROCESS Model 59 was employed to estimate interaction terms and conditional indirect effects within a unified observed-variable framework. AL was significantly and positively associated with both TPD and AE, and AE was positively associated with TPD. The statistical indirect association between AL and TPD through AE was significant. PE did not significantly moderate the AL-AE association. However, the AL × PE interaction in predicting TPD was significantly positive, whereas the AE × PE interaction was significantly negative. As PE increased, the conditional direct association between AL and TPD became stronger, whereas the AE-TPD association and the conditional indirect association became weaker. For school principals and teacher professional development organizers, the findings suggest combining transparent management with meaning-centered communication and autonomy-supportive professional learning activities. Given the single-wave self-report design, these findings represent statistical associations and cannot establish temporal ordering or causal mechanisms.