BACKGROUND: Although research has increased the current understanding of creative teaching, evidence on the factors that influence this behavior and the underlying mechanisms remains limited. OBJECTIVE: This study, grounded in conservation of resources theory, proposed and empirically examined the relation between contingent reward leadership (CRL) among Chinese kindergarten principals and teachers’ creative teaching performance (CTP). In addition, the study assessed the mediating effect of organizational innovation support (OIS), bureaucratic organizational culture (BOC), and innovative organizational culture (IOC), as well as the moderating effect of ideological psychological contracts (IPCs), to provide robust insights into how CRL can motivate kindergarten teachers’ CTP. METHODS: A total of 518 kindergarten teachers aged 20–55 years participated in the study. Structural equation model analysis was conducted to examine the multiple mediating effects of OIS, BOC, and IOC, as well as the moderating effect of IPC in the relation between CRL and CTP. RESULTS: OIS served as a mediator in the relation between CRL and CTP. OIS and BOC played a chain mediating role in the relation between CRL and CTP. OIS and BOC played a chain mediating role in the relation between CRL and CTP. Additionally, IPC positively moderated the indirect relation of CRL on CTP via OIS. CONCLUSIONS: Kindergarten principals should pay attention to the positive impact of leadership style and organizational culture on teachers’ innovative behavior. Moreover, prioritizing the improvement of IPCs would benefit the development of innovative behavior.

Although previous studies have established a positive correlation between perceived organizational change and teachers' work engagement, the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions governing this relationship remain insufficiently explored. Integrating Event System Theory with Conservation of Resources Theory, this study develops a dual‐path moderated mediation model to examine how perceived organizational change influences teachers' work engagement through psychological contract violation and career resilience. Survey data were collected from 513 teachers across 15 vocational colleges in China using a two‐stage cluster convenience sampling approach. The empirical results indicate that rather than acting as a disruptive stressor, perceived organizational change functions as a positive structural event that significantly reduces psychological contract violation, thereby exerting a protective effect on work engagement. Simultaneously, this change perception actively stimulates work engagement by enhancing teachers' career resilience. Furthermore, emotion regulation capacity plays a critical moderating role within the model. Specifically, higher levels of emotion regulation significantly catalyse the motivational pathway driven by career resilience but demonstrate no significant moderating effect on the protective pathway concerning psychological contract violation. These findings provide a novel event‐resource perspective for organizational change theory in educational contexts and offer essential implications for management practices in vocational education.

While prior studies have established work engagement as a crucial antecedent to teacher effectiveness, there has been insufficient exploration of the process through which resource-related stress, particularly Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI), depletes this vital psychological state. This study draws on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory to build an integrative model that outlines how ERI affects rural teachers' work engagement via their job crafting strategies, and how this process is conditional on their level of overcommitment. Results from a cross-sectional field study involving 482 rural teachers revealed that ERI was negatively associated with work engagement. This relationship was dually mediated by a suppression of promotion-focused job crafting and an enhancement of prevention-focused job crafting. Furthermore, the indirect effects were moderated by overcommitment, such that they were stronger for teachers with low overcommitment and non-significant for those with high overcommitment. Overall, this study extends theory by demonstrating how rural teachers engage in resource conservation and loss spirals under conditions of ERI, providing novel insights into the behavioral and dispositional mechanisms that shape engagement in under-resourced contexts.

Drawing on social exchange theory, this study examines the associations between kindergarten principals' creative leadership and teachers' creative teaching performance. Data from 578 kindergarten teachers across eight Chinese cities were analyzed using a multistage stratified sampling method. The results indicate that (1) creative leadership is positively associated with creative teaching performance; (2) this relationship is significantly mediated by both the ideological psychological contract and knowledge-sharing intention; and (3) perceived organizational support moderates these indirect pathways. Specifically, the indirect effects of creative leadership on teaching performance via both mediators are significantly stronger under conditions of high perceived organizational support. These findings elucidate the relational and behavioral mechanisms through which targeted leadership fosters pedagogical innovation, highlighting the necessity of an aligned organizational climate in early childhood education.