Creative teaching is a core component of arts education, yet it often operates under tension within performance oriented school management systems. This study explores how transactional leadership influences creative teaching practices among high school art teachers in China. Adopting a qualitative research design, the study draws on semi structured interviews with 20 art teachers from five public high schools in Shandong Province, covering disciplines including visual arts, music, dance, and calligraphy. Guided by a research framework that integrates creative teaching, transactional leadership, and teachers’ perceptions and strategic responses, the data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings indicate that transactional leadership practices characterized by performance evaluation, supervision, and reward and punishment mechanisms play a significant role in shaping teachers’ instructional conditions. While such practices contribute to organizational order and accountability, they may also constrain pedagogical flexibility and discourage instructional risk taking in creative disciplines. The study further reveals that art teachers are not passive recipients of leadership influence. Instead, they actively interpret leadership practices and adopt strategic responses such as selective adaptation and surface compliance to balance institutional expectations with professional values. These responses mediate the impact of leadership on creative teaching and help explain variations in instructional practices under similar management conditions. This study contributes to the literature by extending transactional leadership research into the underexplored context of secondary arts education and by foregrounding teachers’ agency in mediating leadership effects. The findings offer practical implications for school leaders by highlighting the need for more context sensitive leadership approaches that better support creative teaching within performance oriented educational environments.
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