Examining the Components of an Engineering Leadership Identity

Most approaches to develop leadership in engineering students center on learning leadership skills or cultivating leadership traits.These approaches show mixed results in terms of longerterm translation of these learning outcomes into graduates holding leadership roles in the workplace or viewing themselves as leaders.Grounded in research on engineering identity, this project posited that an identity-based approach to engineering leadership may provide a more efficacious way to develop leadership as part of engineering formation that integrates leadership into engineers' professional identities.To explore this proposition, this project employed a sequential, mixed-methods study resulting in development of a grounded theory of engineering leadership for undergraduate engineering students.This paper shares an overview of the project's path during the funded period and highlights initial findings of how engineering undergraduates define engineering leadership.Starting from the assumption that the formation of engineers is fundamentally an identity development process, the framework for this project combined Lave and Wenger's communities of practice model to understand development of an engineering identity with Komives, et al.'s Leadership Identity Development Model for understanding how engineering students cultivate a self-concept as a leader.Overall, findings helped reveal how the components of engineering identity and leadership identity converge in the development of an engineering leadership identity among undergraduate students.