Engineer Leadership in Organizations and the Implications for Curriculum Development

Abstract

Historically, Canadian faculties of engineering have excelled at developing the technical competencies oftheir students, but have been less successful at developing their communication, negotiation, and relationship building skills [4]. In this paper we discuss findings from the first phase of a large scale, mixed-methods study of engineering leadership. In particular, we are investigating:(1) how engineers contribute to leadership in engineering intensive organizations, (2) the defining characteristics of the leader-engineer; and (3) how we can use these findings to augment curriculum and instruction in engineering education.

Gendering Engineering Leadership: Aspirations vs. Shoulder Tapping

“…It involved a grounded theoretical [7,8] analysis of transcripts from focus groups with 45 engineers employed by four engineering-intensive organizations. This qualitative phase led us to construct three professionally relevant leadership orientations for engineers-technical mastery (the "go to" engineer for technical questions), collaborative optimization (engineers who build high performing teams), and organizational innovation (engineers whose creative ideas drive the company) [9,10]. Our second phase involved a survey to test our grounded theory of engineering leadership with a larger sample of engineers.…”

“…The 175 engineers who completed our survey were asked, among other things, to identify three ideal engineering leaders in relation to the three leadership orientations that emerged from phase one of our study-technical mastery; collaborative optimization; and organizational innovation [9,10]. The prompts for these orientations were as follows: "Imagine the person you go to most often with your technical questions (Technical Mastery)," "Imagine the person who builds high performing teams by bringing out the best in everyone (Collaborative Optimization)," and "Imagine the person whose creative ideas drive the company (Organizational Innovation)."…”

The Ebb and Flow of Engineering Leadership Orientations

“…While this literature presents us with important insights about the rationale for including leadership education in engineering programs, descriptions of the content and pedagogy used by instructors and faculty members beginning to implement these programs, and assessments of engineers' work in relation to managerial leadership theories, very few researchers have stepped back to conceptualize engineering leadership from the perspective of professional engineers. In phase one of our study we attempted to fill this gap by exploring how engineers working in industry thought about leadership, how they characterized leadership exemplars in their profession and how they oriented themselves to professionally relevant conceptions of leadership [41,42]. After learning that the engineers in our sample overwhelmingly resisted the idea of leadership, we returned to the literature in search of engineering leadership theory, but could only find empirical studies evaluating engineers against leadership frameworks borrowed from the management and psychology literature [6, 31-33, 37-40, 43-46].…”

“…Our concern that standards borrowed from other disciplines were among the causes of engineers' resistance to the idea of leadership led us to develop a theory of leadership grounded [47] in the experiences of 45 engineers employed by four Canadian engineering intensive organizations. Through an iterative analytic process, we identified three professionally relevant leadership orientations-Technical Mastery (the "go to" engineer for technical questions), Collaborative Optimization (engineers who build high performing teams) and Organizational Innovation (engineers whose creative ideas drive the company) [41,42]. Since our preliminary theory was based on the experiences of a small sample of engineers, we developed a survey to test the wider professional resonance of the orientations.…”

An Approach to Understand the Role of Identity in Engineering Leadership

“…While many of the university program models were developed using input from a variety of stakeholders, including those in industry, the models of engineering leadership on which they were built are generally not grounded in empirical evidence of the experience of engineers. This gap is beginning to be addressed in the recent work from the University of Toronto (Reeve, Daniels, Rottmann, Sacks, & Wray, 2013;Rottmann et al, 2015). In their work, engineering leadership includes sharing good technical problem-solving skills with others through mentoring, building effective teams through learning and leveraging the strengths of others, and bringing technically sound ideas to market.…”