Asian Journal of Current Research

This study examined whether students’ perceptions of teacher parental leadership were associated with learning burnout among undergraduate medical students in China. Using cross-sectional survey data from 230 students, the analyses focused on three leadership dimensions—benevolent, moral, and authoritarian leadership—and four burnout outcomes: exhaustion, cynicism, reduced academic efficacy, and overall burnout. Pearson correlations and multiple regression models were estimated after controlling for gender and academic year. Benevolent and moral leadership were consistently associated with lower burnout, whereas authoritarian leadership predicted higher exhaustion, reduced academic efficacy, and overall burnout; its association with cynicism was weaker and did not reach the significance threshold in the full model. The final model explained 41.7% of the variance in overall burnout. Moderation tests did not provide robust evidence that the associations differed by gender and academic year. The findings indicate that teacher parental leadership should not be treated as a uniformly beneficial construct in medical education. Specifically, care and moral example appear to buffer burnout, whereas control-oriented authority appears to intensify it. These findings suggest that medical schools should strengthen teacher development around supportive, fair, and grounded authority while reducing control-oriented practices that may intensify student burnout.