Building An Effective Team: The Influence of Leadership Style On Modes of Collaboration

Abstract

Because of the increasing importance of team based projects in both the engi-neering classroom and the workplace, there is a need to understand the na-ture of team work itself and to identify those factors that will foster a team's success. This paper will focus on what constitutes effective collaboration and a successful leadership style; specifically, it will compare the individual lead-ership styles of three students on three teams. While the findings discussed here are part of a larger qualitative study that looks at the inf1uence of gender on engineering student teams who are engaged in a collaborative project, this paper will present only the data that relate to team leadership styles. The paper concludes that, largely because of its leader's positive influence and its own collegial style, only one team produced a higher quality document at the same time as it exhibited the attributes identified by Allen et al. ( 1987) as critical to effective collaboration: balanced interactions combined with con-sensual decision-making and shared responsibility.

Keywords

• engineering
• collaboration