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Perceived Importance and Confidence in Leadership Ability: A National Survey of Final Year Canadian Engineering Students

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

Advancing Research on Engineering Leaders’ Confidence, Careers, and Styles

Tagged Division

Engineering Leadership Development

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

22

DOI

10.18260/1-2--33167

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/33167

Download Count

503

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Paper Authors

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Serhiy Kovalchuk University of Toronto

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Serhiy Kovalchuk is a research associate at the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto.

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Qin Liu University of Toronto

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Dr. Qin Liu is a research associate at the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, University of Toronto.

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Cindy Rottmann University of Toronto

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Cindy Rottmann is the Associate Director of Research at the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering, University of Toronto. Her research interests include engineering leadership in university and workplace settings as well as ethics and equity in engineering education.

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Mike Klassen University of Toronto

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Mike Klassen is PhD Candidate in Higher Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. He was a long-time team member at the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead). Mike has an MA in Higher Education and a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto.

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Jamie Ricci Indspire

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Jamie Ricci is currently a researcher at Indspire, Canada's largest charity supporting Indigenous peoples' access to education. Prior to joining Indspire in 2018, Jamie worked at Engineers Canada as the Manager of Research. Here, she examined enrolment and graduation trends of engineering students, their school-to-work transitions and labour market outcomes. Jamie also focused on increasing Indigenous peoples' access to and representation in engineering in Canada. While at Engineers Canada, she collaborated with ILead at the University of Toronto.

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Doug Reeve P.Eng. University of Toronto

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Dr. Reeve is the founding Director of the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) (2010-2018) at the University of Toronto. After a lengthy career as a consulting engineer he made development of personal capability central to his work with engineering students, undergraduate and graduate. In 2002 he established Leaders of Tomorrow, a student leadership development program that led to the establishment of ILead in 2010. In 2017, he was part of the team that developed the OPTIONS Program (Opportunities for PhDs: Transitions, Industry Options, Networking and Skills) for engineering PhD students interested in careers outside the academy. He is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry.

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Emily Moore P.Eng. University of Toronto

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Emily Moore is the Director of the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (Troost ILead) at the University of Toronto. Emily spent 20 years as a professional engineer, first as an R&D engineer in a Fortune 500 company, and then leading innovation and technology development efforts in a major engineering firm.

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Abstract

Engineering leadership as a field of study has grown rapidly in the last two decades (Handley et al., 2018; Klassen et al., 2016), but there is limited understanding of how engineering students view the importance of leadership skills generally and how they appraise their confidence in their own leadership skills in comparison to other skills. This paper addresses these gaps by investigating how a nation-wide sample of 2,485 final year Canadian undergraduate engineering students perceive the importance of leadership ability; how confident they are in their own leadership ability, and how these two measures interact in comparison to other professional and technical skills across demographic (gender, race, and residential status) and academic (discipline and academic standing) variables. Our findings show that towards the end of their undergraduate studies the students overall viewed leadership ability as important to becoming a successful engineer and were relatively confident in their ability; that they rated their proficiency in leadership ability slightly higher than the importance of it; and that students’ importance and confidence ratings of leadership ability were associated with particular demographic and academic variables. Our findings also demonstrate that the students rated the importance of leadership ability substantially lower than other professional skills such as teamwork and communication; that they viewed leadership ability and math and science skills as almost equally important to becoming a successful engineer; and that they considered themselves to be slightly more competent in leadership than other professional skills and math and science skills. Drawing on the expectancy-value theory (Eccles et al., 1983, 2000, 2002), we argue that even though the students overall valued leadership, they ascribed a lower utility value to it than to other professional skills such as teamwork and communication and thus may be less likely to be motivated to practice it than these other skills, at least at the early stage of their career.

Kovalchuk, S., & Liu, Q., & Rottmann, C., & Klassen, M., & Ricci, J., & Reeve, D., & Moore, E. (2019, June), Perceived Importance and Confidence in Leadership Ability: A National Survey of Final Year Canadian Engineering Students Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--33167

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