Leadership and Communication Network Identification and Analysis with Dependency Structure Matrices in Senior Design Teams

Abstract

A case study is presented that explores informal leadership emergence within capstone student design teams. The study focused on a ten-person, multi-university, multi-disciplinary, twosemester design project focused on unmanned aircraft solution design and build. This study uses a sociometric survey instrument to determine perceived leadership and communication relationships between team members. These relationships are modeled through dependency structure matrices (DSM) that are then analyzed against various complexity and similarity metrics. The network analysis illustrates that relationship leadership networks are less dense than the transitional and action leadership networks. Moreover, communication networks were aligned more with the transition or action leadership networks at corresponding thresholds. This illustrates that not all aspects of leadership can be inferred from the communication processes within a design team.