2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Leadership skill development within engineers is more critical than ever to create sustainable and equitable solutions in today’s complex world. One pedagogical strategy to facilitate the development of student leadership skills is through the use of project-based design courses, where students work in teams to solve open-ended design problems. Due to the self-managed nature of student design teams, it is largely up to the students to decide how they will work together, so personal conceptualizations of leadership may affect how students contribute to their team, and may have lasting consequences on student learning and future teamwork and leadership behaviours.

Leadership can be conceptualized in a variety of ways including traditional and contemporary approaches. Previous research has indicated that youth share some conceptualizations of leadership with adults, but also have unique perspectives of who and what makes a leader. Little is currently known about how first-year engineering students understand and employ leadership within their design project-teams.

This work aims to answer the following research questions:
(1) How do students conceptualise leadership within their design team?
(2) What are the implications of these conceptualizations on student contributions to their team over time?

This work employs multiple perspective, longitudinal qualitative interviews over a term-long project to deeply examine the perceptions of leadership within one first-year engineering design team at the University of Toronto.

Findings show that all students recognized two students as "leaders" within the team, but the reasoning behind these conclusions varied. Initially, leadership within the team was largely conceptualized in traditional ways, with an emphasis on outgoing personalities. As the team developed, traditional views persisted with a focus on management behaviours being linked to leadership. This led to other students unfairly deferring to the leaders within the team to distribute tasks and manage expectations and deadlines. Students also described leadership within the team in association with helping and connecting behaviours, reflecting more contemporary beliefs of leadership. This led to the team's leaders taking more responsibility and putting forth more effort, while other students put forth less. The consequences of these dynamics were severe, with the one of the leaders in the team experiencing high levels of stress and burnout, while other students unfairly benefited from the leaders' hard work. Interestingly, the teaching team appeared to be unaware of these team dynamics throughout the term, and did not intervene. There were lasting consequences of these dynamics for the students, most notably for one of the leaders who would no longer be seeking out leadership opportunities.

This work indicates a potential need for more robust leadership education within the core first-year engineering curriculum, and leadership support throughout the design process for first-year project teams to facilitate more collaborative and contemporary understandings and approaches to leadership.