Assessment of Engineering Students’ Leadership Competencies

The PMP course, which is offered annually as an elective course, aims to equip 4th-year engineering students with leadership competencies and with project management and facilitation skills. The approach used for leadership development is experiential and combines formal training, an integrated design project, personal coaching, and reflective journal writing.

Formal training is carried out through in-class teaching. Its purpose is to equip students with the key concepts relevant to leadership, project management, and facilitation techniques and tools (Alabart et al. 2008b, 2008c; Özgen 2010). The integrated design project allows the 4th-year students to have hands-on experience in leading a team (the IDP team) and in thinking, feeling, and acting as leaders. This on-the-job training approach is an essential part of the leadership development process (Allio 2005). Personal coaching has recently emerged as an effective competency development process (Thach 2002; Wales 2002) and has thus been included in the PMP course to provide support and feedback tailored to the individual and specific needs of student leaders. The coaching sessions are conducted in formal, 20-min, individual meetings held every week throughout the academic year. Reflective journal writing is used to help the student leaders reflect and to provide them with feedback tailored to their specific needs (Alabart et al. 2008b; Boud et al. 1985; Hogan 1995). The team leaders work with their IDP teams for two consecutive academic semesters (15 weeks each). Team leaders are responsible for team development. They meet needs, achieve goals, and manage the way in which their team works. The team leader acts as a role model for the team members and helps them build relationships, adopt methodologies, and gain the knowledge and skills needed so they can take on greater levels of responsibility over time and increase performance. The team leaders’ responsibilities are described in Table 1.

Although the term leader was conceptualized in prebiblical times (Van Seters and Field 1990), the scientific study of leadership began only at the turn of the 20th century (Bass 1981). Since then, several approaches have been taken to research on leadership, as shown in Table 2.

The latest research on leadership has focused on the competencies of effective leaders. The concept of competency is not new and has been around for centuries. For instance, the early Romans were known to practice a form of competency profiling by listing the attributes of a “good Roman soldier” (Draganidis and Mentzas 2006). Competency models began to proliferate in the early 1990s after McClelland (1973) demonstrated that knowledge tests, school grades, and credentials did not predict job performance or success in life and suggested that competency should become the basis for more effectively predicting individual performance in organizations. Consequently, competencies have attracted much attention and have been applied to recruitment, assessment, staff development, performance management, and career planning (Cheng et al. 2003; Draganidis and Mentzas 2006). The first empirically based and fully researched book on competency model development was written by Boyatzis (1982), who defined a competency as an underlying characteristic of a person that leads to or causes superior or effective performance in a job or situation (Boyatzis 1982; Yeung 1996).

The competency scheme applied in the PMP course is based on a competency dictionary developed at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Alabart et al. 2008a) based on the framework of the eight fundamental concepts described in the European Foundation for Quality Management (2003) Excellence Model. This dictionary covers eight competencies; the operational definitions are summarized in Table 3.

Competencies in the dictionary are structured in three progressive mastery levels. The first level, self, is for people who do not supervise other people. The second level, team leadership, is designed for people who lead a team or a unit in an organization. Finally, the third level, organizational leadership, is reserved for those who lead the whole organization. Each of these levels is characterized for each competency by five behavioral descriptors. Therefore, there are 40 behavioral descriptors for each level for the eight competencies, and the entire dictionary consists of 120 behavioral descriptors. Although the PMP course revolves around the eight competencies included in Table 3, the student leaders were neither introduced to nor trained in the 120 behavioral descriptors in the competency dictionary.

The results are presented in two sections: (1) leadership behaviors and competencies demonstrated by team leaders and (2) team leaders’ perceived leadership effectiveness.

The two objectives of this study were to determine the leadership behaviors and competencies demonstrated by the student leaders and to assess their perceived leadership effectiveness. The results indicate that the great majority of the student leaders studied (90.9%) mostly demonstrated leadership behaviors at the team leadership proficiency level. This finding is understandable given the fact that the 4th-year student leaders were expected to deploy leadership behaviors at this level so they could act as real leaders when building, managing, and leading their integrated design project teams.

The results show that the student leaders exhibited most frequently the competencies of commitment to learning, interpersonal communication, teamwork, and results orientation (see Table 4). These most frequently demonstrated competencies are directly related to the main job responsibilities assigned to student leaders (see Table 1). Therefore, these student leaders demonstrated behaviors that enabled them to fulfill their team leadership responsibilities.

The results also indicate that the students demonstrated the following competencies infrequently (see Table 4): integrity, drive for excellence, responsiveness to change, and client orientation. This finding might be explained by the nature of the IDP projects that the students carried out. These projects were well defined and were carried out in a non-real-world, non-client-driven environment. Therefore, it was difficult for students to demonstrate client orientation in the classroom environment, where they were unable to experience the pressures caused by the expectations of real clients. In addition, the well-defined IDP projects may not have allowed students to demonstrate the creativity and innovation that are required for excellence, which may explain the low frequency occurrence of the drive for excellence competency. Regarding the responsiveness to change competency, it should be noted that unexpected or major changes generally did not occur during the IDP projects, which limited the opportunities for the leaders to exhibit this competency. It was somewhat surprising to find that integrity was a low-frequency competency for these student leaders. These findings are important when trying to understand the leadership behavioral repertoire of the 4th-year students. Such information can be very valuable for educators wishing to provide targeted training on apparently undeveloped competencies and to enhance the richness of students’ behavioral repertoires.

The findings indicate that students’ leadership effectiveness was perceived as satisfactory. However, what was unexpected was that the student leaders rated themselves significantly lower than did their team members on several competencies. This finding was surprising because the 360-degree feedback literature indicates that self-ratings tend to be consistently higher than ratings by others (Bass and Yammarino 1991; Conway and Huffcutt 1997). For example, in a study of 31 construction management and civil engineering students, Ellis and Petersen (2011) found that on average, the leaders’ assessments of themselves were higher than the assessments by their peers. In contrast, our student leaders rated their effectiveness significantly lower than did their team members in the client orientation, drive for excellence, results orientation, and teamwork competencies ($p<.05$). It is understandable that the student leaders should be more critical of their effectiveness in drive for excellence and client orientation than their team members because these are the competencies that they used least frequently (see Table 4). The leaders’ awareness of their infrequent use of these competencies may have led them to be more critical in their self-ratings. It is surprising, however, to find that the student leaders’ ratings of their effectiveness were also significantly lower than those of their team members regarding the teamwork and results orientation competencies, given that these are among the competencies they most frequently used. This finding suggests that the student leaders did not fulfill their expectations of themselves as team leaders in these two competencies.

This study investigated the leadership competencies and effectiveness of eleven 4th-year engineering students acting as team leaders to teams of 1st-year students working on integrated design projects. The results show that the team leaders’ behaviors occurred mostly at the team leadership proficiency level rather than at the self or organizational leadership levels. The findings suggest that the framework used (senior students leading junior students) facilitates the emergence of team-oriented leadership behaviors such as teamwork, interpersonal communication, and commitment to learning. The results also indicate that the students’ leadership effectiveness was perceived as satisfactory. The data collected would be useful in modifying the integrated design projects and the project management in practice course. This, in turn, would enable the leadership training to be targeted more effectively so as to enrich students’ leadership behavioral repertoire. The educational model described in this paper can be easily implemented in other institutions to encourage and nurture leadership talent in students.

The first author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Fundació Universitat Rovira i Virgili, and Aprendizaje de los Productos Químicos, Sus Usos y Aplicaciones.