Idealized Influence and Church Leaders Performance, the case of Transformational Church Leadership Graduates

This study sought to investigate the influence of Idealized Influence on church leader’s performance focusing on the Pan Africa Christian University (PAC) Transformational Church Leadership (TCL) diploma program graduates of 2016 and 2017 in selected churches in Kenya. The Transformational Leadership Theory guided the study. The study used pragmatism research philosophy to conduct a descriptive research. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected using survey and interviews respectively. This study adopted both stratified and purposive sampling. A sample of 158 graduates and 59 congregants/members from 14 Counties in Kenya, and 6 key informant interviews of senior organizational leaders were used to measure the variables of the study. The quantitative data was prepared and analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS version 22.0). The recordings from the zoom interviews were transcribed using Otter.ai and transferred to Miner Lite for coding and organized into themes. The study found out that leader’s idealized influence had a positive and significant correlation with church leader’s performance among graduates, with a Pearson correlation of r=0.527. The study revealed that idealized influenced graduates/church leaders modeled the taught Christian values, Christian disciplines and character which significantly influenced church growth. The study concluded that TCL trained church leaders practiced idealized influence which positively and significantly increased the church leader’s performance in Kenya. The study recommended the use of the TCL program to churches as a means of training church leaders to modeling Christian values, disciplines, and character and inspire the members/congregation enhance their performance and enable the church achieve its goals and objectives.