Influence of Transformative Leadership on Quality of Vocational Training in Youth Polytechnics within Nakuru County

Abstract

With the devolved modes of governance in Kenya, administration departments have been established at the county levels with the intention of bringing services near the people. Education is an essential service that is key to the development of the country. Youth vocational training is one of the components of education that was devolved, the other being Early Childhood education. The transition from the national government to county governments is characterized with grappling with new roles and mandates, emergence of disruptive technologies and unstable financial support among others. These pose a threat to the quality of youth vocational training in the polytechnics. The study’s objective was to evaluate transformational leadership that comprises of four factors namely; idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration and their influence on the quality of vocational training in youth polytechnics in Nakuru County. The study was anchored on the Transformational Leadership Theory and Theory of Social Partnerships. The researcher embraced a mixed method research design that employed both quantitative and qualitative research approaches aimed at attaining the benefits of research triangulation. The target population for the study was 198 youth polytechnic staff and 11 sub-county education officers. The study used clustered sampling to select 33 youth polytechnics from all the 11 sub-counties in Nakuru County and purposive sampling for the education officers. A census was done for the 198 polytechnic staff members. Data was collected using questionnaires from the officers and interview schedules from the administrators. Data was analyzed with the help of Statistical Packages for Social Science (SPSS) using descriptive statistics to present results in summaries. For all the aspects of transformational leadership in the youth polytechnics, the resultant mean was more than 3 which implies that transformational leadership was practiced to a great extent. From the inferential statistics namely regression, correlation and Chi-square, all the coefficients were positive and the p-values less than 0.05. This informed the rejection of the null hypotheses thus accepting the alternative. This implies that transformational leadership has a strong positive influence on quality of vocational training that is significance at 5% levels of significance. Based on the study findings, the study advocate for support of youth polytechnics with adequate facilitation, stakeholder involvement as well as collaboration of different agencies to ensure that the youth polytechnics are able to offer quality vocational training. There is also a need for the policy makers to ensure that transformational leadership is implemented in institutions of similar nature based on its effectiveness.