Understanding the Perceived Impact of Engineers’ Leadership Experiences in College

In order to lead the social process required to solve society’s grandest challenges 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. Greater numbers of engineering educators are recognizing this need and establishing engineering leadership certificates and minors through centers at universities throughout the country. While the implementation of these offerings is a step forward, most programs tend to focus on leadership as a set of skills or experiences bolted onto a traditional engineering education with limited formal evidence of the impact these experiences have on student development. The purpose of this study is to test the effect of experiences engineering students have in leadership roles on their perceived gains in leadership skills, using a national dataset. The framework guiding this study is a model for engineering leadership identity constructed from Lave and Wenger’s communities of practice model and Komives et al.’s model for leadership identity development (LID) which recognizes that the engineering formation process is, at its core, an identity development process. Engineering leadership is theorized to develop from peripheral participation in engineering communities of practice in ways that promote students’ leadership development. Specifically, undertaking leadership roles in curricular and co-curricular engineering activities develops students’ sense of engineering leadership identity, which results in their recognition of gains in different leadership skills. The data for this study come from the 2015 administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), overseen by the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University. The NSSE is administered to a random sample of firstand fourth-year students, and focuses on curricular and co-curricular student engagement. In 2015, NSSE included a pilot module to assess leadership experiences at 21 participating institutions. The overall sample includes 2607 students who held a leadership role, among whom are 90 engineering students. The dependent variables for this study are a set of eight items prompting students to indicate the extent to which participation in a leadership role contributed to development of different leadership skills. This study employs multiple regression to test the relationships among leadership related experiences and eight leadership skill outcomes for engineering students. Significant results across the eight regression models paint a complex portrait regarding factors that affect gains in leadership skills for engineering students. For example, receiving formal leadership training is a significant positive predictor of only three of the leadership outcomes explored in this work: thinking critically and analytically, working effectively with others, and continuing leadership after college. These results can be utilized by educators engaged in Engineering Leadership education to tailor their program experiences and better achieve the desired educational outcomes. Introduction In a seminal work in the area of engineering design, Bucciarelli [1] 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 [2, 3]. This need provides the impetus for developing greater levels of engineering leadership in undergraduate students. The need for engineers who can lead is gaining ever greater recognition by engineering educators, as evident by the development of an increasing number of engineering leadership development programs [4] and continued expansion of ASEE’s Engineering Leadership Development Division. Given the interest in developing engineers who are prepared to lead, a key question is understanding how effective these programs are in cultivating the desired leadership outcomes. In this work, we explore this question using a national dataset that provided the opportunity to explore students’ self-reported skill development in key areas of leadership. This study utilizes the responses of 90 engineering students to better understand what experiences made the greatest impact. These experiences are also present in the literature on leadership development [5], and are common practice in existing engineering leadership programs [4, 6, 7]. Leadership and Engineering Leadership has been studied for almost as long as human history, with the ancient works of the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese all exploring the topic [8]. Despite this long history and an ever growing research base [9], there is little evidence of a commonly accepted definition of the topic. This sentiment has led to the conclusion stated in The Nature of Leadership that “given the complex nature of leadership, a specific and widely accepted definition of leadership does not exist and might never be found” [10]. What this lack of definability likely means is leadership is multifaceted, needing to be defined and bounded within the context in which the process is being examined. As such, the literature on leadership within particular domains (like engineering) tends to reflect consensus, in spite of a lack of broader consensus across the field of leadership. While definitions of leadership vary widely, they can largely be placed into one of two groups. The first group, include those definitions that look at leadership as a set of traits that the most successful leaders have, the trait theories [11]. These theories of leadership have largely fallen out of favor in western cultures over the past one – two generations [12]. During this time, behavioral theories have gained prominence. These theories hold that the behaviors of leaders impact their effectiveness and can typically be combined into groups similar to those of Katz and Kahn [13], who categorized behaviors as task oriented, relationship oriented, and participative leadership. Training for behaviors in one or more of these categories is often the focus of engineering leadership programs. Understanding leadership within the engineering context is critical not only for the reasons stated earlier, but also due to the resistance of engineers to leadership, likely a result of perceiving leadership not as engineering knowledge or work (Reeve, Rottmann, & Sacks, 2015). Existing engineering leadership programs tend to define engineering leadership in relation to the technical knowledge needed to enter the field, typically describing engineering leadership as the leverage of technical expertise to influence and inspire colleagues toward solving important problems [14-17]. These programs then employ a variety of trainings and experiential activities to foster leadership development in engineering undergraduates. Leadership Development Engineering leadership programs often define leadership learning outcomes in terms of specified leadership skills that will be required of new professionals entering the field, yet often fail to couch programs within the context of a broader leadership theory [4, 18]. The bulk of the leadership development literature focuses on identifying formal practices and informal experiences that contribute to leadership development to evaluate and improve existing programs and to provide guidance for the development of new programs [19-22]. In this work, we are interested in beginning to understand the relationship between identity and leadership in undergraduate students. To do this, we apply Astin’s [23] model for assessing the impact of college on student development. Commonly referred to as the I-E-O model (referring to inputs, environments/experiences, and outcomes). The I-E-O framework provides several perceived outcomes of academic and cognitive development that reflect leadership identity. While the focus of leadership outcomes does not entirely align with the I-E-O framework, student cognitive growth (e.g. critical thinking or job-related skill development), is central to leadership identity. In fact, all indicators of leadership quality analyzed in this research may be found in both Astin’s [23] Self-Reported Cognitive Growth indicators and Lave and Wenger’s Communities of Practice model [24]. This focus brings the study to more recent work to examine the role of identity in the development of leadership skills. A wide variety of researchers have examined the role of identity in development of leadership [25-28]. As summarized by Ibarra, et al. [29], work in this area generally focuses on the development of a leadership identity for working professionals, especially as prompted by position or career transitions. This is true even for their proposed extension of work in this area, which posits that leadership development is an identity transition process focused on self-change using a process of separation, transition and incorporation [29]. For the purposes of this work, our interest rests in the identity transition of college students, not working professionals. As such, the model of Engineering Leadership Identity Development in this work leverages the Leadership Identity Development (LID) model [30]. Many of the existing engineering leadership models are tied to educational or training interventions intended to develop students’ leadership skills, which is why it is somewhat alarming that authors of two recent meta-analyses, spanning the last 34 years of the leadership development literature, concluded that these experiences are not consistently effective [12, 31]. These findings indicated that, while formal courses were found to be effective at developing specific skills as measured by pre and post intervention testing, it was unclear how effective these skills are when deployed by the subject of