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

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.