The influence of engineering competition team participation on students' leadership identity development

Abstract

Background: Engineering competition teams (ECTs) allow college students to learn about and practice leadership within a technical domain, yet we know little about the mechanisms by which leadership development occurs within these teams. This paper explores how ECT participation contributes to students' leadership identity development (LID). Purpose: This paper addresses the following research questions: RQ1: How does the ECT experience contribute to students' relational LID? RQ2: What other factors influence ECT participants' LID? RQ3: Does the ECT experience provide opportunities for LID that are different from those provided by other experiences? Design: This paper reports the second phase of a mixed-methods study. ECT members participated in individual semistructured interviews. Transcripts were analyzed via an interpretivist approach using deductive and constant comparative methods. The analysis employed the LID model as the primary theoretical construct. Results: ECTs contributed to most participants' LID. Factors affecting the extent of development included project complexity, team practices related to the claiming and granting of a leadership identity, positional leadership experience, involvement with other organizations, and preconceptions of leadership. Compared with other experiences, ECTs placed more emphasis on leadership based in expertise. Technical competence was considered a key attribute of ECT leaders. Conclusions: ECTs enhanced the LID of most participants, helping them understand leadership as a relational process. The LID model offers promise for designing engineering leadership development programs.

BIM for the Realization of Sustainable Digital Models in a University-Business Collaborative Learning Environment: Assessment of Use and Students’ Perception

“…The university-business collaborative learning environment proposed has motivating factors common to other studies [54][55][56][57][58][59][60]. As other studies denote [61,62], the inclusion of a real and competitive challenge, posed in collaboration with a business environment, was more effective than working on a fictitious case, and it is an important component of engineering education. The students found that presenting their projects to the rest of the teams, teachers, and professionals of the participating company was satisfying and that their personal relationships increased with your curricular activities.…”

Team leadership in engineering education

“…Working in teams gives engineering students an opportunity to practice leadership skills (Knight & Novoselich, 2017; Wolfinbarger & Shehab, 2015), build agency (Liang et al., 2019) and develop a leadership identity (Kwapisz et al., 2019; Rosch & Imoukhuede, 2016; Wolfinbarger et al., 2021). Although many articles in the engineering education literature discuss both leadership and teamwork, the treatment of these concepts is inconsistent.…”

“…Functional leadership theories (Burke et al, 2011) capture many of the activities performed within engineering teams. For example, Wolfinbarger and Shehab (2015) and Wolfinbarger et al (2021) used the team leadership framework (Burke et al, 2006) to identify leadership behaviours reported by members of competition teams. Righter et al (2019) used the functional team leadership model (Morgeson et al, 2010) to categorise leadership behaviours enacted within design teams.…”

“…For example, Wolfinbarger and Shehab (2015) and Wolfinbarger et al. (2021) used the team leadership framework (Burke et al., 2006) to identify leadership behaviours reported by members of competition teams. Righter et al.…”

Secondary School Adolescents’ Knowledge of Corrupt Practices in Nigeria: Some Implications for Counselling and Value Reorientation

“…Collaboration is seen as being crucial in makerspaces because it allows students a significant say in what and how they design and create, allowing them to choose the activity's focus and the dynamics of their group projects (Peppler et al, 2016). Leadership improvement takes place within these teams, even though these teams provide a specialized place to learning about and exercising leadership within a technical domain (Wolfinbarger et al, 2021). Universities are convinced that having a sufficient level of education and training requires students to completely acquire the abilities needed to access the labour market as well as a certain mastery of the subject matter of a particular syllabus (Garcia, 2016).…”