Engineering leadership: Grounding leadership theory in engineers’ professional identities

Abstract

In recent years the US-based National Academy of Engineering and Engineers Canada have urged engineering educators to supplement technical coursework with multiple domains of professional skills development. One such domain is that of engineering leadership. While leadership education is beginning to be infused into some undergraduate engineering programs, it has not yet gained traction as a legitimate field of study. The legitimacy of the field depends on engineers recognizing themselves as members of a leadership profession. Our paper facilitates this process of recognition by grounding leadership theory in the professional experiences of engineers employed by four Canadian engineering-intensive firms. Our constant comparative analysis of qualitative data collected through nine focus groups and seven interviews suggests that engineers are largely resistant to dominant leadership paradigms drawn from other disciplines, but that they do, in fact lead in ways that blend key aspects of their identities with professionally recognized forms of influence. Our compound model of engineering leadership has practical and theoretical implications for engineers, leadership theorists and engineering educators.

Comparison of Career Success Competencies and Engineering Leadership Capabilities

“…As stated by Rottman, Sacks and Reeve, "engineering leadership depends on engineers recognizing themselves as leaders" [25]. One of the largest barriers to engineering leadership at postsecondary institutions is that leadership activities supported by engineering faculties are primarily through optional extracurricular involvement [2].…”

Developing the Global Engineering Leader at a Leading Engineering Institution in the Southeast

“…Rottmann et al's research highlights implications of defining engineering leadership development programs within and outside of technical engineering content (25). Based on research conducted by researchers at the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILEAD) at University of Toronto, this paper presents a grounded theory study that makes a case for grounding leadership theory in engineers' professional identities, that is, professionally recognized forms of engineering influence.…”

The Ebb and Flow of Engineering Leadership Orientations

“…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.…”

“…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].…”