CHARACTERIZATION OF LEADERSHIP WITHIN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING DESIGN TEAMS THROUGH CASE STUDY ANALYSIS

DS 68-8: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED 11), Impacting Society through Engineering Design, Vol. 8: Design Education, Lyngby/Copenhagen, Denmark, 15.-19.08.2011

Year: 2011
Editor: Culley, S.J.; Hicks, B.J.; McAloone, T.C.; Howard, T.J. & Ion, B.
Author: Palmer, Gary; Summers, Joshua
Series: ICED
Section: Design Education
Page(s): 110-119

Abstract

The paper explores leadership that exists within undergraduate engineering design teams. Often, leadership is described based on managerial styles, leadership types and styles, emotional intelligence, and work climate. However, little work explores leadership specifically within engineering and educational environment. The motivation of this research is further inspired based on the researcher’s own experience in undergraduate engineering design teams and the lack of formal leadership structure and training in typical engineering education programs. Leadership is identified in this research through conducting case study research by examining two undergraduate engineering design teams addressing different projects in different course settings. The results and conclusions from each study are extracted by triangulating within and across each of the data collection methods. Through these two case studies, leadership is clearly found present in both cases and with task-oriented leadership being the more prevalent type.

Keywords: LEADERSHIP; DESIGN TEAMS; CASE STUDY

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