Relationship between principals' transformational leadership style and secondary school students' academic performance in Kenya Certificate of secondary education in Bomet County, Kenya

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. Copyright©2020 by authors, all rights reserved.