University faculty members' organizational commitment has been undermined facing with the increasing managerialist pressure. Against the backdrop, this study examined the effects of departmental-level academic leaders' transformational and contingent reward leaderships on university faculty's organizational commitment through the mediating role of psychological empowerment. A total of 1278 university faculty from 25 research intensive Chinese universities participated in a questionnaire survey. The results showed that both transformational and contingent reward leaderships had positive effects on university faculty's psychological empowerment and organizational commitment. They further showed that university faculty's psychological empowerment positively mediated the relationships between both transformational and contingent reward leaderships and organizational commitment. More empirical studies should be conducted to confirm the positive effect of academic leaders' contingent reward leadership on university faculty's psychological empowerment and organizational commitment in higher education contexts across countries. The limitations and implications of this study were discussed.