Abstract:
The aim of this study was to establish the influence of head teachers’ leadership styles on pupils’ academic performance in public primary schools in Moiben Sub-County in UasinGishu County of Kenya. The objectives of the study were: to assess the effect of head teachers’ centralized authority on pupils’ academic performance in public primary schools; to establish the effect of head teachers’ teacher involvement on pupils’ academic performance in primary schools; to establish the effect of head teachers’ top-down leadership style on pupils’ academic performance in primary schools, to establish the effect of head teachers’ administrative support on pupil academic performance in public primary schools. This study was guided by Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Descriptive survey design was adopted. The study targeted 90 public primary schools, 90 head teachers of those primary schools and 500 teachers of the primary schools in Moiben Sub-County.The sample population for the study consisted of 45 purposively sampled head teachers and 160 teachers selected using simple random sampling from the 45 schools in MoibenSub-County. The sample size was, therefore, 205. Questionnaires and interview schedules were used as instruments for data collection. The questionnaires were designed based on the research objectives and literature review. They contained both structured and unstructured questions. The research instruments were pre-tested to improve theirvalidity and reliability.The Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient was 0.765. When the value of r is higher than 0.5 the instrument is assumed to yield data that have high reliability and therefore can be adopted for the study. The collected data was cleaned up, coded and entered into the SPSS computer program version 20 for analysis. Descriptive statistics included percentages and other measures of central tendencies which were used to analyse the data. Based on the findings, majority of the teachers disagreed on the head teachers’ centralized authority; majority of the teachers agreed on the head teachers’ teacher involvement.Furthermore, majority of the teachers disagreed on the top-down leadership style.Similarly, majority of the teachers agreed on the head teachers’ administrative support to teachers. Based on these findings, itwas, therefore,concluded that involvement of teachers by the head teacher resulted inimproved academic performance in public primary schools in Moiben Sub-County. It is also recommended that head teachers should be further trained on leadership styles so that they can enhance administrative support to the teachers for better academic outcomes.
