The objective of the study was to investigate on the effects of principal leadership style on school performances in public and private secondary schools in Cameroon. The study brought out the following research problems: does the autocratic leadership style affect school performances?, do laissez-faire leadership style affect school performances?, does democratic leadership style affect school performances?, do situational leadership styles affect school performances?. The paper adopted a survey. A survey looks at the individual, group of people, groups and material to describe, analyse and interpret entities. The survey is also employed to enable the researcher study a large number of populations, one of the quantitative research models. The universe of this paper was made up of 426 certified secondary teachers in the Mfoundi Division in the Centre Region of Cameroon by the easily accessible sampling method (simple random sample) where every everybody had the same chance of being selected for the study. The data were obtained by using a questionnaire which was made up of three parts. Part one was the demographic information, for part two we had principal leadership and school performances and the last part was school performances. The questionnaire was analysed using statistical package for social science (SPSS) and smart partial least square – structural equation (PLS-SEM). The results of the study revealed that: Democratic leadership style affect school performances positively (path coefficient of 0,964), laissez-faire leadership styles affect school performances positively (path coefficient of 0,905), autocratic leadership style affects school performances positively (path coefficient of 0,955) and the situational leadership style affect school performances positively (path coefficient of 0,979). Finally, the results proposed situational leadership style as the best style that can be used by principal in order to improve on school performances since it had the highest path coefficient of 0.979. A model was proposed at the end of the study called “principal leadership style and school performances” as seen in figure 5.

Keywords : Principal, Principal Leadership Style, School Performances.