Relationship between Principals' Transformational Leadership Style and Secondary School Students' Academic Performance in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education in Bomet County, Kenya

Kipkoech Kitur,Jepkemboi Choge,Edward Tanui

doi:10.13189/ujer.2020.080210

Kipkoech Kitur, Jepkemboi Choge + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2020.080210

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Abstract

Leadership style is an important aspect in students’ academic performance in schools. Transformational leadership style is associated with the students’ academic achievement in KCSE. The study sought to establish the relationship between idealized influence of principals’ transformational leadership style and students’ academic performance in KCSE in Bomet County in Kenya. The descriptive survey design was used for this study whose target population comprised of 130 secondary schools and five Quality Assurance and Standards Officers in Bomet County. Stratified random sampling procedure was adopted to sample out schools as boys’, girls’ and mixed schools; then Slovin’s formula was used to obtain a total of 108 schools. While purposive sampling procedure was applied to choose one Director of Studies from each 108 schools selected and five Quality Assurance and Standards Officers from the five sub-counties in Bomet County. A total sample of 118 respondents from 108 secondary schools and the five sub-counties participated in the study. When collecting the data, instruments used were Director of Studies’ questionnaires, Quality Assurance and Standards Officers’ interview guides, school and Bomet County Director of Education KCSE records. Chi-square test was adopted to establish the relationship between principals’ idealized influence and academic performance and the results showed that principals’ idealized influence had a strong significant relationship with students’ academic performance in KCSE. Thus, idealized influence characteristics are most effective in promoting students’ academic achievement. The study recommends that the idealized influence should be adopted and displayed by principals in order to improve academic performance in KCSE examinations.

Highlights

Idealized influence describes leaders that serve as role models for their followers, allow them to identify with a shared organizational vision, and provide a sense of meaning and achievement (KEMI, 2014)
The design was chosen because it was suitable to the study since it involved describing and exploring the relationship of principals’ transformational leadership styles and students’ academic performance in Bomet County
There were 130 Directors of Studies based on 130 public secondary schools which had candidates from 2010 to 2014 K.C.S.E. examination in Bomet County and five Quality Assurance and Standards Officers in Bomet County having five sub-counties

Summary

Introduction

Leadership is the most effective when leaders choose more effective styles like transformational leadership (Germano, 2010). It is easy to practice idealize influence of transformational leadership, and is the best style of leadership in all situations. Idealized influence describes leaders that serve as role models for their followers, allow them to identify with a shared organizational vision, and provide a sense of meaning and achievement (KEMI, 2014). It involves school principal leading by example, mentoring, having high expectation, having a best-practices emphasis, holding students and teachers accountable among others (Hauserman & Stick, 2013)

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