Industrial Leadership that Inspires: Managerial Communication as an Emerging Pedagogical Focus in Engineering

Abstract

To explore the characteristics of effective industrial leadership, this work embarked on a quantitative effort to investigate requirements posed on leaders. Contrary to previous competence-based studies, the present work examined leader qualities more broadly through substantive knowledge, personality traits, socio-emotive skills, cultural awareness, and ethics and values. A particular aim was to conceptualize and operationalize effective leader behavior in industries to identify relevant and targeted foci for engineering pedagogy. Statistical analysis and factor analysis of the data from 503 respondents on 81 leader traits or skills shows that leadership that elicits positive organizational outcomes is founded on such leader personality dimensions as reliability, and such socio-emotive skills as self-leadership, emotional stability, inspiration and assertive communication.