2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the growing presence of leadership programs in engineering colleges, educators are increasingly interested in how to most effectively support the leadership development ABET requirement. While the focus of leadership programs in undergraduate engineering education is the support of student growth, the more important question is how these leadership skills will impact society. Applied ethics training has long existed in the fields of medicine, law, and business. In contrast, meaningful education in the ethical challenges within engineering is relatively sparse. This relative silence reflects institutional practices that leave new engineering undergraduates ill-prepared for the ethical questions facing them as they begin their professional career. This blind spot in professional training is especially problematic for those engineers who eventually take roles of increased responsibility and leadership. Moreover, the outsized impact that responsible (or irresponsible) use of technology has on society highlights both the urgency and importance of addressing this educational blind spot.

To meet this challenge, this research paper provides elementary steps for positioning ethics in engineering leader development. The strategy for the paper includes leveraging Social Power Theory to understand leadership processes in autonomous professions such as engineering. Engineering leader identity is framed by the three-fold Technical Expertise, Collaborative Optimization, and Organizational Innovation model. Within this context, the paper introduces an utilitarian ethic to understand the role that ethical behavior and considerations play in engineering leadership: such as asking relevant questions about the benefit (and consequences) of one’s actions, understanding the nature and bounds of one’s social power, and acknowledging the shortcomings of an utilitarian ethic itself.

The integration of a structured ethical framework into engineering leadership has several noteworthy outcomes. First, it helps to further the current socio-technical description of engineering by clarifying the boundaries between social and technical. Second, it highlights the tension between industry, government, and non-government organization interests. Third, an ethical framework clarifies the tensions between the engineer’s multifaceted responsibilities as employee, family provider, guardian of public health, and citizen. Finally, interrogating existing engineering leadership models through one ethical framework illuminates ways the field might benefit from integrating ethics into our leadership conversations in a more structured way. These outcomes further the leader ethics domain. Moreover, they align with the ASEE LEAD strategic Explore initiative, as we strive to understand the full demands that engineering leaders must bear as employees, guardians of public trust, and citizens.