An Approach to Understand the Role of Identity in Engineering Leadership

In order to most effectively contribute to the development of solutions to society’s greatest challenges, engineers must learn to lead the interdisciplinary teams required to develop these solutions. However, most undergraduate engineering programs do little to develop leadership skills in their students. Perhaps, one reason for this gap between needs and education is a conflict between the development of an engineering identity and a leadership identity. To date, the literature contains little work that illustrates the role leadership concepts play in the formation of an engineering identity. Therefore, more work is needed to understand the formation of a leadership identity within the formation of an engineering identity. Together, these development processes constitute the formation of engineering leaders. This paper presents the methods underway to validate and refine a proposed theoretical model of engineering leadership identity development. This model can be used to reshape existing engineering leadership education programs and integrate leadership into the engineering curriculum in an innovative manner. The model starts with a fundamental assumption that the engineering leadership formation process is, at its core, an identity development process. This assumption is also central to two established theoretical perspectives that informed the construction of this model. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities of practice model argues that the development of a professional identity is the outcome of learning within a community of practice, and is frequently used to explain the process by which undergraduates develop a sense of engineering identity. The communities of practice model is then combined with Komives, Owen, Longerbeam, Mainella, and Osteen’s (2005) Leadership Identity Development Model to outline how engineering students might cultivate a self-concept as a leader. A key argument within this model is that college students develop a personal sense of leadership as an identity when they view leadership as a process, not merely a position. This paper first explains the development of this theoretical model of engineering leadership identity development combining the literature from engineering identity development, leadership identity development within collegiate populations, and engineering leadership. Following this explanation, this work focuses on the methods developed and currently being deployed to validate and refine the model, including initial findings from this research. Introduction As society finds itself facing ever more complex challenges, many in government and industry have called for training greater numbers of engineers to provide our workforce with the skills needed to successfully design solutions to these challenges. However, designing these solutions is difficult not only due to the complexity of the problems faced, but also the very nature of the engineering design process. In a seminal work in the area, Bucciarelli (1994) revealed that design is a social process that only exists in a collective sense. In order to lead this social process and ensure that the capabilities of an expanded engineering workforce are successfully harnessed, new engineers must be more than just technical experts, they must also be technical leaders (National Academy of Engineering, 2013; National Research Council, 2005). This need provides the impetus for developing greater levels of engineering leadership in undergraduate students. While the Green Report called for inclusion of leadership in engineering education over a generation ago (Dowell, Baum, & McTague, 1994), the engineering education community has only recently built momentum in this area as shown by increasing research activity and, in 2014, developing a leadership-focused division of the American Society for Engineering Education (American Society for Engineering Education, 2014). Perhaps the most visible aspect of this momentum is the establishment of engineering leadership certificates and minors through centers at universities throughout the country (Graham, 2009; Klassen et al., 2016). While the implementation of these programs is a step forward, most programs tend to focus on leadership as a set of skills or experiences bolted onto a traditional engineering education (Palmer, Birchler, Narusis, Kowalchuk, & DeRuntz, 2016). This approach does little to understand the more complete picture of how leadership fits into the broader picture of the heterogeneous nature of engineering work (Reed Stevens, Johri, & O'Connor, 2014), and the role leadership plays in the formation of an engineering identity. In fact, to date, there is little empirical work in the engineering education body of knowledge that illustrates the role leadership concepts play in the formation of an engineering identity. This project seeks to address that gap through a sequential, mixed-methods study. The overall goal of the project is to construct a grounded theory of engineering leadership as a component of the professional formation of undergraduate engineers, offering implications for the incorporation of leadership development throughout the undergraduate curriculum. This paper presents the approach underway to refine and validate this model, starting with a brief explanation of the theoretical underpinnings of the model, followed by the methods underway and proposed to study engineering leadership identity, concluding with some initial results from the analysis of a national data set of student views on leadership. Leadership Identity as a Component of the Formation of Engineers At its core the formation of engineers is an identity development process (Johri, Olds, & O’Connor, 2014; Meyers, 2009). However the place of leadership within this process is little understood. The work presented here seeks to close this gap using a conceptual framework that is built from the literature in leadership identity and engineering identity, and refined by the nascent literature in engineering leadership. Developing a Leadership Identity Based on the literature, it appears students need both formal experiences, geared at developing specific leadership skills, and informal experiences, providing opportunities to assume leadership and make meaning of those experiences. Unfortunately, this research also shows that this skill development is often less than effective when put into practice (Collins & Holton, 2004; Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm, & McKee, 2014). What seems to be missing is an understanding of how students make meaning of their exercise of leadership—particularly for engineering students whose leadership experiences occur within the context of their professional preparation. A model that emphasizes the cultivation of one’s self-concept as a leader—the process by which people begin to view themselves as leaders—could better explain how a person becomes a