2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Exploration of role assignment in engineering design teams on leadership

Over the last 20 years, engineering educators have realized the importance of building leadership skills among engineering students. This movement is evidenced by the creation of dozens of engineering leadership programs that offer classes, certificates, minors, and even a Bachelor of Science in engineering leadership. Despite these initiatives, research shows that professional engineers do not view engineering as a leadership profession [1]. ABET and industry agree that engineering students should intentionally develop leadership skills during college. This study explores leadership concepts within capstone engineering teams.

The aim of this study is to learn how the assignment of project roles in engineering capstone design teams influences leadership skills such as accountability, communicating a vision, teamwork, role identity, and management, along with measures of leader effectiveness. The research is situated within the capstone design context at a large mountain-region flagship university. In this class, a group of 6-7 senior engineering students work together to complete an industry-sponsored design project.

The topic will be explored through a shared leadership lens [2], to understand the roles correlated with leadership skills and the links between role assignment and the students' level of leadership effectiveness. The goal with this proposed project is to determine how these role assignments contribute to the leadership development of engineering students. We explore this topic by analyzing data previously gathered in the course survey given to all enrolled students, approximately 230 students a year. This robust final survey has questions related to desired learning outcomes for the course, many of which are leadership skills in team settings. Additionally, survey results explore leadership effectiveness using the Competing Values Framework (CVF). As summarized in Redacted et al., [3] the CVF highlights four leadership orientations: Collaborate, Create, Control, and Compete [4]. The key tenant of the CVF is behavioral complexity, which is defined as the ability to implement various leadership orientations, depending on the needs of a given situation. Instead of identifying a person’s behaviors as aligning with one orientation, the empirically tested theory equates effective leadership to the ability to implement various leadership behaviors as needed. Research in professional business settings shows that individuals who are the most effective leaders have competence in all four leadership orientations [5]. We explore both leadership skills and behavioral complexity (and therefore leadership effectiveness) for students based on their assigned role in their capstone design project team.

Research questions:
1. Do students perceive assigned roles contribute the to development of their leadership skills
2. Is this moderated by students’ leadership styles using the CVF perspective?

This study highlights a new direction for leadership in capstone design teams. While the concept of shared leadership in this context is not new, few other capstone design programs focus student work using role assignment. Little research has been done on the outcomes related to leadership in specific role assignment within engineering student teams, despite common role identification in a typical engineering industry setting. We expect that this exploratory study will lead us to pursue future investigation into the connections between role assignments and leadership skills, potentially leveraging theories from both engineering and leadership identity development (and their intersectionality), role identity development, and motivation.

Preliminary results indicate that students perceive a positive impact of assigned roles on their leadership skill development. Additional results will be discussed in the paper.

C. Rottmann, R. Sacks, D. Reeve, Engineering leadership: Grounding leadership theory in engineers’ professional identities, Leadership, 11(3), pp. 351–373, 2015.
Redacted, International Journal of Engineering Education, 2019.
Redacted, ASEE Conference Proceedings, 2022.
K. S. Cameron, R. E. Quinn, J. DeGraff, and A. V. Thakor, Competing Values Leadership, 2nd ed. Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2014.
K. A. Lawrence, P. Lenk, and R. E. Quinn, “Behavioral complexity in leadership: The psychometric properties of a new instrument to measure behavioral repertoire,” Leadership Quarterly, vol. 20, pp. 87-102. 2009.