Connected by Purpose: How Organizational Effectiveness Relates to Leadership Styles and Employee Engagement in a Philippine Public Welfare Agency

Abstract

Whether the leadership employees experience and the engagement they bring to their work are significantly associated with organizational outcomes remains an empirical question that Philippine public-sector research has largely left unanswered. This study examined the relationship between organizational effectiveness and the sub-variables of leadership styles and employee engagement among employees of the Department of Social Welfare and Development Field Office 10 (DSWD-10), Northern Mindanao, Philippines. Employing a quantitative correlational design, data were collected from 350 employees selected through stratified random sampling and analyzed using Pearson product-moment correlation. Four leadership styles (transformational, transactional, servant, and democratic) and four engagement dimensions (vigor, dedication, absorption, and commitment) were correlated with three organizational effectiveness outcomes: job satisfaction, workplace productivity, and service quality. Findings showed that all twenty-four correlations were positive and statistically significant, leading to the rejection of the null hypothesis for every pairing. Two distinct relational patterns emerged. Leadership styles correlated most strongly with job satisfaction, led by servant and democratic leadership, and only moderately with workplace productivity and service quality, where democratic leadership was consistently the strongest style. Employee engagement, by contrast, associated robustly with all three outcomes, with commitment the strongest correlate of job satisfaction and dedication the strongest correlate of both workplace productivity and service quality. The study concludes that leadership relates most proximally to how employees experience their work, while engagement is most closely associated with what employees produce and deliver. The findings affirm the Full Range Leadership Theory, Servant and Democratic Leadership perspectives, and the Job Demands-Resources Model, and identify commitment- and dedication-building as high-leverage points for public welfare institutions.