While leadership is the talk of this 21st century, servant leadership is a topic surfacing in countries like Guyana and the Caribbean. Many leaders would have to adopt a new approach to engaging their workforce as the old command and control mentality has become obsolete. The purpose of this quantitative study is to examine the relationship between servant leadership and employee engagement in five organizations in Georgetown, Guyana. The research aims to answer the question, Does developing servant leadership behaviors among senior staff strengthen employee engagement in a Guyanese context?
Two research instruments were used to gather the data: the Servant Leadership Survey (SLS) by Van Dierendonck and Nuijten (2011), which was used to measure servant leadership, and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) by Schaufeli and Bakker (2004), which was utilized to measure employee engagement in the five organizations. The research was limited to the sample size of 121 participants, which represents a convenient sampling of the five organizations.
This research clearly shows a statistically significant relationship between servant leadership behavior and employee engagement. The results also show that implementing leadership training, mentoring, and coaching also positively affects employee engagement. Additionally, the analysis reveals that there is a significant relationship between age and employee engagement, gender and employee engagement, as well as years of employment and employee engagement. It is my hope that this research provides a foundation for those desiring to conduct future research in the Guyanese context on the two variables - servant leadership and employee engagement.