Horizontal and vertical integration of engineering education is achieved through an early‐design project where students get acquainted with Total Quality Management (TQM) principles and design processes from year‐one of their University education. The project is embedded in the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum as an activity that involves horizontally several first‐year subjects and vertically a fourth‐year Project Management Practice course and a related Project Management subject. An assessment of the integrated design project indicates that effective teaching and learning spreads through the curriculum, with fourth‐year students acting as project managers and experiencing engineering practice. These management and leadership training processes include a shared responsibility in the organization and in the development of the project, which are key factors for the success of the integrated activity. They are also a first step towards the ETSEQ goal of becoming a sustainable student‐centered educational system.
Leadership development has become increasingly important in engineering education as companies look for engineers with leadership, communication, and teamwork skills. To embed these competencies into engineering curricula, a competency-based educational model has been implemented in which 4th-year engineering students led design project teams made up of 1st-year students. The study described in this paper had two aims. The first was to determine which leadership competencies were exhibited by the 4th-year students. The second was to assess their perceived leadership effectiveness. We identified leadership competencies using the behavioral event interview technique and measured leadership effectiveness using a 360-degree assessment. The results demonstrate that the student leaders exhibited the following competencies most frequently: commitment to learning, interpersonal communication, teamwork, and results orientation. The results also indicate that the 1st-year students perceived the student leaders' leadership effectiveness as satisfactory. The educational model described in this paper can easily be implemented in other institutions to encourage and nurture leadership talent in students.L e a d e r s h i p a n d M a n a g e m e n t
The selection process of team leaders is fundamental if the effectiveness of teams is to be guaranteed. Human values have proven to be an important factor in the behaviour of individuals and leaders. The aim of this study is twofold. The first is to validate Schwartz's survey of human values. The second is to determine whether there are any relationships between the values held by individuals and their preferred roles in a team. Human values were measured by the items of the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) and the preferred roles in a team were identified by the Belbin Self Perception Inventory (BSPI). The two questionnaires were answered by two samples of undergraduate students (183 and 177 students, respectively). As far as the first objective is concerned, Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) was performed at the outset to examine how well the two-dimensional circular structure, as postulated by Schwartz, was represented in the study population. Then, the results of this analysis were compared and contrasted with those of two other published studies; one by Schwartz (2006) and one by Ros and Grad (1991). As for the second objective, Pearson correlation coefficients were computed to assess the associations between the ratings on the SVS survey items and the ratings on the eight team roles as measured by the BSPI.
Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV). He received a B.Ch. and a Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona and an MBA from ESADE (Barcelona). His research, consultative, and training projects interests focus on the areas of Organizational Effectiveness and Leadership. He is co-founder and director of the Master in Business Administration program at the URV. Sibel Özgen, University Rovira i Virgili Sibel Özgen is currently a Research Assistant doing her Ph.D. at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from Ege University, Izmir, Turkey. She also received her M.Sc. in Chemical and Process Engineering from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in 2007. Her research interests include competency assessment, competency development, leadership, feedback 360 degrees, and teamwork. Magda Medir, University Rovira i Virgili Magda Medir is Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. She received a BSCh from the IQS (Barcelona), a MASc from the University of Toronto, and a BSChE and a ScD from the University of Barcelona. She is the director of the Chemical Education for public Understanding Program in Spain and her research interests are related to science and engineering education.
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