Industrial Leadership that Inspires Managerial Communication as an Emerging Pedagogical Focus in Engineering

Abstract

Abstract-To explore the characteristics of effective industrial leadership, this work embarked on a quantitative effort to investigate requirements posed on leaders. Contrary to previous competence-based studies, the present work examined leader qualities more broadly through substantive knowledge, personality traits, socio-emotive skills, cultural awareness, and ethics and values. A particular aim was to conceptualize and operationalize effective leader behavior in industries to identify relevant and targeted foci for engineering pedagogy. Statistical analysis and factor analysis of the data from 503 respondents on 81 leader traits or skills shows that leadership that elicits positive organizational outcomes is founded on such leader personality dimensions as reliability, and such socio-emotive skills as self-leadership, emotional stability, inspiration and assertive communication.

Knowledge and Skills Level of Graduate Civil Engineers Employers and Graduates’ Perceptions

“…Lappalainen [19] examined leader qualities more broadly through functional knowledge, personality characters, socio-emotive skills, cultural awareness, and ethics and values. The aim is to conceptualize and operationalize effective leader behavior in industries to identify relevant and targeted emphases for engineering pedagogy.…”

Examining the Engineering Leadership Literature: Community of Practice Style

“…While these two problem statements are underpinned by different philosophical paradigms, authors whose work we have grouped together in this section advocate for a similar solution-help engineers develop the necessary skills, traits and styles to be effective leaders or managers. Two authors argued that managers of engineers should be responsive to the particular needs, personality types and learning styles of engineers [10,11], two compared the leadership styles of engineering managers to non-engineering managers [12,13], seven urged engineering leaders to develop their social, interpersonal and communication skills [14][15][16][17][18][19][20], and the remaining two warned us against characterizing engineers' leadership styles in a culturally neutral manner [21,22].…”

“…The authors use these findings to argue that emotional intelligence training would benefit engineers by helping them complement their technical skills with necessary social skills. Similarly, three papers written by Lappalainen focus on the importance of communication, socio-emotional and interpersonal skill development for engineers [18][19][20]. Based on a survey of 80 managers and 354 subordinates employed by seven engineering-intensive organizations in Finland, she found that emotional intelligence was a stronger predictor of effective engineering leadership than traditional analytic intelligence.…”