Examining the Engineering Leadership Literature: Community of Practice Style

Inherent to the career trajectories of professional engineers is an expectation that they learn to integrate communication, interpersonal and leadership skills into their technical knowledge base. While this process may feel smooth and natural to some, research suggests that others find it challenging and require support [1-3]. Our paper examines three bodies of literature relevant to engineering leadership learning in industry contexts: industry perspectives on the skills, traits and styles of effective engineering leaders; large-scale surveys tracking engineers’ career paths and transitions; and ethnographic studies examining engineers’ professional identity development. Our primary reason for doing this is to ground the next phase of our engineering leadership project in the literature. In addition to this project-specific goal, we use the paper to document the collective, interdisciplinary process we used to review the literature. We begin by identifying our search criteria and fleshing out three key themes in the literature. We then analyze the themes through a conceptual framework made up of four theoretical tensions relevant to leadership learning: leadership as a position/process; social action shaped by human agency/social structure; learning as a situated/formal endeavour; and social justice as a central/peripheral concern. After discussing the significance and limitations of our interdisciplinary literature review experiment, and highlighting a gap in the leadership learning research, we generate a list of recommendations for engineering educators, industry leaders and engineering leadership researchers. Introduction: Reviewing the literature CoP (community of practice) style Lave and Wenger’s notion that workplace learning takes place in a Community of Practice (CoP) helped us characterize our collaborative literature review experiment as a simultaneous process of learning and professional socialization [4]. A summer reading group—initiated by our Director and Senior Research Associate—began with two objectives: 1) to generate a literature review for the next phase of our engineering leadership project and 2) to build cohesion in our expanding, interdisciplinary research team. We sent out invitations to five individuals, all of who agreed to join our community of readers. Our group consisted of two engineering professors, three social science researchers, a staff member responsible for industry connections, and an undergraduate industrial engineering thesis student. We held six, two-hour meetings between July 13 and October 4, 2017 involving guided discussion of seven articles selected by group members in attendance. The first meeting functioned as a capacity building orientation— allowing us to share the objectives of our reading group and practice using our reading guide as a platform to discuss engineering leadership research. The remaining five meetings consisted of guided article reviews, a discussion of key findings, and a conceptual mapping exercise. Each group member identified, read and led a discussion of one article each week, then participated in our group mapping exercise. The facilitator read all articles identified by group members, synthesized findings between meetings, and disseminated these findings to members for review. At the end of each meeting we collectively identified gaps in our growing conceptual map and key words for further exploration. Please see Table 1 for our selection criteria. In contrast to traditional literature reviews that come to a close once the reader has reached a conceptual saturation point, we stopped reading after completing the pre-determined six two-hour meetings. Table 1: Literature review search criteria Meeting Number Selection Criteria Rationale Selected & led by Read by