Student Leadership Style

1. Back ground
Globally, educating a nation remains the most vital strategy for the development of the society throughout the developing world (Aikman & Unterhalter, 2005). The effect of leadership style on academic performance has been widely debated in recent scholarly work. Only a small fraction of available studies on school leadership deal with its effects on academic performance. There is also increasing recognition that schools require effective leaders and managers if they are to provide the best possible education for their learners. Schools need trained and committed teachers but they, in turn, need the leadership of highly effective principals and support from other senior and middle managers. The head teacher has always been looked

Indeed this is portrayed in the NECTA results of those schools like school A and B who mentioned that they use more of democratic leadership style than any other type of leadership style. There is progressive improvement in their academic performance. This is in line with Okoth (2000), who carried out a study on the effects of leadership styles on students‟ performance in K.C.S.E. in Nairobi Province, Kenya, and found out that head teachers rated as being democratic had high mean performance index than autocratic head teachers. The findings contradict Njuguna (1998) who found that there is no significant relationship between leadership styles and students‟ K.C.S.E. performance. Huka (2003), brings a point of contradiction by noting that head teachers who are rated most democratic had the lowest mean scores in academic performance. Also Kendra Cherry a psychology expert argues that although democratic leadership has been described as the most effective leadership style, it has some potential downsides. In situations where roles are unclear or time is an important factor, democratic leadership can lead communication failures and uncompleted projects. In some cases group members may not have the necessary knowledge or expertise to make quality contributions to the decision making process.
9. Conclusion
Based on the findings it was concluded that majority of secondary school head teachers in Meru district had adopted democratic leadership style. Schools which had adopted democratic leadership style had mixed results regarding students’ performance in the NECTA performance; findings show that there are those who performed well while other performed poorly but to a larger extent democratic leadership leads to better academic performance.
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