Four Generations, One Mission: A Descriptive Analysis of Leadership Styles, Employee Engagement, and Organizational Effectiveness in a Philippine Public Welfare Agency

Abstract

Public welfare institutions in the Philippines now operate with one of the youngest and most generationally diverse workforces in government, yet baseline evidence describing how these employees perceive their leaders, experience their work, and assess their organization remains scarce. This study provided a descriptive profile of leadership styles, generational cohort composition, employee engagement, and organizational effectiveness among employees of the Department of Social Welfare and Development Field Office 10 (DSWD-10), Northern Mindanao, Philippines. Using a descriptive quantitative design, data were gathered from 350 employees selected through stratified random sampling and analyzed using frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations. Findings revealed a predominantly young workforce, with Millennials and Generation Z jointly constituting the overwhelming majority of employees while Baby Boomers have nearly exited the agency. All four leadership styles were rated High, with transformational leadership obtaining the highest dimensional mean and the four styles tightly clustered, indicating a versatile, multi-style supervisory repertoire. Employee engagement was High overall, with dedication uniquely rated Very High and the perceived importance of one’s work emerging as the strongest single element of the engagement profile. Organizational effectiveness was likewise High across job satisfaction, workplace productivity, and service quality, with team collaboration the only sub-dimension rated Very High; however, recognition, compensation and benefits, and end-of-day energy emerged as the lowest-rated areas, a pattern consistent with the predominantly non-regular employment arrangements covering most respondents. The study concludes that DSWD-10 possesses a mission-driven, high-performing, and highly dedicated workforce whose well-being infrastructure has not kept pace with its performance, and offers an evidence-based workforce profile that public welfare agencies can use for leadership development, engagement programming, and human resource policy; the inferential questions arising from this profile are examined in separate companion papers.