Murumba, Lucy W2024-04-192020-08-142024-04-192017-10https://repo.pacuniversity.ac.ke/handle/123456789/3004.2Leadership plays a key role in the performance of an organization. The need for effective leadership in Kenya’s coffee industry, is important specifically in ensuring that institutions for farmers such as co-operative societies accrue benefits to members and to the country at large. This is because coffee plays a significant role in Kenya’s economy through its contribution to foreign exchange earnings, family farm incomes, employment creation and food security. The smallholder coffee farmers’ rely on cooperative societies due to the advantage of economies of scale to market their coffee. There has been a general perception from the public that co-operatives are poorly managed, and lack transparency and accountability. Numerous challenges have been cited such as poor payments to farmers, disillusionment of farmers and subsequent abandonment of coffee farming and signal poor performance in Kenya’s coffee industry. This study used a mixed methods approach to determine the perceived influence of leadership roles on performance of coffee co-operative societies in Othaya and Mukurweini Sub-counties of Nyeri County in Kenya. The aim was to explore how respondents perceived leadership roles namely: building mutual trust and co-operation, ensuring social justice and morality, encouraging collective learning and developing and empowering people, influenced performance in co-operative societies. Information was gathered from five cooperative societies and a sample of 371 respondents using questionnaires distributed to the respondents and semi-structured interviews carried out with five secretary Managers. The results were analysed through a thematic and regression for both qualitative and quantitative data respectively. The results from the analysis revealed that the four roles were perceived to have positive influence on performance of co-operative societies with mutual trust and co-operation, and collective learning having significant influence compared to social justice and molarity and developing and empowering people. The expectations from the respondents were contrary to the real situation on the ground of poor performance, identifying a research gap that needed to be investigated. The results were discussed in light of future needs for leadership research, and in determining the changes necessary for leaders and members to develop desirable changes in organizational performance.enPerceived Influence of Leadership Roles,Performance of Societies in Othaya and Mukurweini Sub Counties of Nyeri County in KenyaThesis