How to Help Senior Chemical Engineering Students Enhance and Develop Their Leadership Competence

摘要

Chemical engineering students at the University Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain) have the opportunity to enhance and develop their leadership competence by taking on a team leadership role in a first-year integrated design project. All fourth-year students enrolled for the Project Management in Practice (PMP) course go through a comprehensive team leader selection process. This selection process involves doing three psychometric tests (Belbin, Myers-Briggs, and Leadership Styles) and a competency-based interview with all the PMP's instructors. Finally, a group of about a dozen students are chosen to lead teams formed of first-year students and to manage the design project in which all first-year courses actively participate (hence the adjective of integrated). First-year team member selection is done by team leaders who develop their own selection criteria and take into account first-year students' Belbin roles. The PMP course, like the first-year integrated design project, lasts two consecutive 15-week periods with 4 class hours per week. One hour is reserved for the individual coaching process between a PMP instructor and his/her assigned team leaders. Two more hours are devoted to teaching leadership, project management, and facilitation concepts, techniques, and tools. The remaining class hour is devoted to the weekly formal meeting of leaders with the first-year project team. Hence, there is also a vertical integration between the PMP course and the first-year integrated design project. The assessment of the team leaders' leadership competence is carried out at the individual and team levels. At the individual level, the following processes are in place: (a) a 360-degree feedback process, (b) project management reports (a team charter and a final report per period), oral presentations (one presentation per period), (c) learning journals, (d) behavioral event interviews, and (e) focus groups with team members. Team effectiveness is measured by: (a) a team climate survey, (b) the evaluation of project products (a design report and a poster or an oral presentation followed by a defense), and (c) focus groups with first-year instructors.