Profiles of multisource support and teaching efficacy among teachers in Chinese private universities: a latent...

Teaching efficacy is an important psychological belief concerning teachers' judgments of instructional capability and effectiveness. Most existing research on workplace support received by teachers has adopted a variable-centered approach, focusing primarily on average associations between individual sources of support and teacher outcomes, while paying less attention to heterogeneity in how multisource support resources are configured within teachers. Using survey data from 400 teachers at six private universities in Qingdao, China, this study treated emotional and material support from the organization, leaders, and colleagues as profile indicators. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify configurations of teacher support resources, and the BCH method was used to compare General Teaching Efficacy (GTE) and Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE) across profiles. The selected six-profile solution differentiated six sample-relative patterns: the Very Low Overall Support Profile, Low Overall Support Profile, Moderate Balanced Support Profile, Relational Support-Dominant Profile, Organizational Support-Dominant Profile, and High Balanced Support Profile. The profiles differed significantly in both dimensions of teaching efficacy. The Very Low Overall Support Profile had the lowest means, whereas the Organizational Support-Dominant Profile and High Balanced Support Profile had relatively high means. A series of robustness and sensitivity analyses supported the broader profile patterns, although exact profile boundaries and membership showed some model sensitivity. The findings indicate that support environments in private universities vary in both overall resource levels and asymmetric configurations across support sources. By contrast, independent differentiation between emotional and material support within the same source was less pronounced. The findings suggest that teacher support practices should consider both the adequacy of available resources and how support from different sources is combined, with multidimensional support-needs assessments focusing on patterns of resource adequacy across organizational, leadership, and colleague support rather than on fixed profile classifications.