عصمت پاسدار

This research investigates the interaction between leadership styles and managers' self-efficacy on teachers' psychological empowerment and creativity using a neural network approach. It is a descriptive-correlational study applied to the teachers in Iranshahr city during the 2024-2025 academic year, with a population of 1,800 individuals. A sample size of 317 was determined using Krejcie and Morgan's table, and 310 completed questionnaires were analyzed. Four established questionnaires measured the variables: Leadership Style (Bass and Avolio, 1969), Managers' Self-Efficacy (Bandura, 1986), Psychological Empowerment (Spreitzer, 1995), and Creativity (Amabile, 2001). Validity was confirmed by expert opinions, and reliability was assessed using Cronbach's alpha, yielding values of 0.92, 0.83, 0.77, and 0.79, respectively. Hypothesis testing employed variance-based structural equation modeling and a multi-layer perceptron neural network, implemented in SMARTPLS 0.4 and SPSS27 software. The neural network model featured three input layers, one hidden layer with two units, and two output layers. The hyperbolic tangent function determined the hidden layers. The training model error was 0.19, while the test sample error was 0.07. The study confirmed the impact of leadership styles and managers' self-efficacy on teachers' psychological empowerment and creativity, with a coefficient of determination of 63%, indicating a significant explanation of creativity influenced by independent and mediating variables. The mediating role of self-efficacy was fully confirmed.