The Formation of Undergraduate Engineers as Engineering Leaders

Montana State University, Bozeman MT

Investigators

Abstract

Today, leaders of industry and government are calling for increasing numbers of engineering graduates to maintain the nation's economic competitiveness. However, the expected positive impact from increasing the number of engineering graduates will be limited, unless the full capabilities of these graduates are harnessed. Specifically, solving today's complex challenges will require cooperation among experts from many fields. In order for these collaborations to be successful they must harness the diverse capabilities of members of these groups. For that to happen, practicing engineers must exercise technical leadership. Therefore, undergraduate engineering students need to learn how to be effective leaders during their formation as engineers. Unfortunately, engineering educators do not currently have sufficient understanding of how engineering students develop into leaders. This project seeks to improve our understanding of the role leadership plays in the process of becoming an engineer and how to develop an engineering identity in undergraduate engineering students. The project proposes that seeing oneself as an engineering leader requires both the development of an engineering identity in combination with the development of a leadership identity. This project investigates the process of becoming an engineering leader given the central role identity plays in learning. By understanding the relationship between a leadership identity and an engineering identity, this work will provide a foundation for improving the leadership skills of undergraduate engineers during their time in college using cross-ethnic notions of leadership to serve a diverse student body. Current approaches in engineering education to develop leadership skills in engineers do little to understand how leadership fits into the broader picture of the heterogeneous nature of engineering work, or the role leadership plays in the formation of an engineering identity. This project seeks to address this gap through a sequential, mixed-methods study resulting in development of a grounded theory of engineering leadership for undergraduate engineering students. The study will answer three research questions: 1) How does leadership identity in engineering students compare to those in other fields? 2) What is the relationship between leadership identity and engineering identity? 3) How do engineering undergraduates define engineering leadership and develop a sense of engineering leadership identity? This work recognizes that formation of engineers is fundamentally an identity development process. This project combines two models: Lave and Wenger's communities of practice model to understand development of an engineering identity and Komives, et al.'s Leadership Identity Model to understanding how engineering students cultivate a self-concept as a leader. Using these two models, this project seeks to understand how the separate components of engineering and leadership identity converge in the development of a combined engineering leadership identity among undergraduate students. Informed by an analysis of national data, a grounded theory approach will lead to an explanatory model of engineering leadership identity development. As an initial application of the model a series of educational interventions will developed and tested, enabling engineering educators to more effectively train engineering students in leadership.