| Summary: | South Africa have some of the lowest employee engagement scores in the world. Leadership is a key determinant of employee engagement, but existing leadership theories and practices are often ineffective in more humanistic and collectivistic cultures like South Africa. To this end, Ubuntu and servant leadership is posited to positively influence organisational performance by increasing employee engagement. The primary objective of this study is to investigate perceptions regarding the impact of Ubuntu and servant leadership on employee engagement in private organisations of the Eastern Cape. A quantitative research design was utilised and yielded 428 usable questionnaires through nonprobability sampling. The empirical results revealed that the spirit of solidarity dimension of Ubuntu leadership influenced significantly and positively. Furthermore, it was found that survival and spirit of solidarity had a significant and positive influence on organisational performance as measured through the balanced scorecard (BSC). Servant leadership positively and significantly influenced employee engagement and organisational performance. In addition, it was found that employee engagement mediates the relationship between servant leadership and organizational performance. This study has made several significant empirical and theoretical contributions, and can be classified as one of the pioneering attempts to gather empirical evidence on how Ubuntu manifests in the workplace. The high convergent validity of the dimensions of Ubuntu leadership and comparisons to Servant leadership established in this study, provides some proof of its novel contribution towards leadership theory. A highly reliable and valid measuring instrument was developed to evaluate Ubuntu from a leadership perspective. This is a major empirical contribution as, at the time, there were no reliable scales available in South Africa to measure Ubuntu leadership.
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