Leadership and Communication Network Identification and Analysis with Dependency Structure Matrices in Senior Design Teams

Leadership and communication are important elements of the collaborative design environment. Capstone design projects provide engineering students with an opportunity to exercise and observe leadership within design teams. While formal leadership roles and structures commonly exist within these teams, informal leadership behaviors are also found and can be significant. This paper presents a case study that explores informal leadership emergence within capstone design teams. The study focused on a ten- person, multi-university, multi-disciplinary, two-semester design project focused on the design and build of an unmanned aircraft system. Informal leadership in the team is explored through the lens of functional leadership and the occurrence of leadership behaviors within teams. These behaviors are further categorized as transition, action and relationship functions. This study uses a sociometric survey instrument to determine perceived leadership and communication relationships between team members. These relationships are modeled through dependency structure matrices (DSM) that are then analyzed against various complexity and similarity metrics. The network analysis illustrates that relationship leadership networks are less dense than the transitional and action leadership networks. Moreover, communication networks were aligned more with the transition or action leadership networks at corresponding thresholds. This illustrates that not all aspects of leadership can be inferred from the communication processes within a design team. Understanding the distribution and emergence of leadership behaviors in capstone design teams may assist faculty advising these engineering teams and in the development of interventions. Follow-on studies may be conducted to further explore informal leadership structures in student design teams. This understanding can also assist in the development of collaborative support tools and methods.