The purpose of this research is to develop an understanding of followership behaviors in engineering design teams situations by studying leadership behaviors.  While leadership in engineering design teams has been studied from a role, function or behavior, and individual charateritic points of view, none have examined follower (helping) behavior in the context of an engineering design team.  Understanding this behavior can lead to intervention strategies that might be employed to improve team dynamics and performance.  To this end, a theoretical framework of follower behavior is defined based on a reivew of “helping behavior” from the literature.  Charateristics of follower helping behavior include exhibiting citizenship, voluntary, extra-role, and not upsetting the status-quo.  Specifically, a follower-leader is one who exhibits voluntary, “extra-role” (beyond expectation) behaviors in a professional setting done without upsetting the status-quo in a formal leadership setting.  A model is developed that links leadership style, follower mindset, leader-follower relationship, influence tactics, follower behavior, and follower performance.  The key behavior studied is helping behavior.  This literature based framework is exclusively based on survey study data.  No research is found that focuses on studying the behaviors of followers from observational studies.  Therefore, data presented from a previous protocol study is further reviewed in search of patterns of conversions of followers to leaders through behavior modelings.  In the previous study, eight teams of four graduate engineering students were tasked with generating a function model for a design prompt.  These teams were video recorded and their behaviors coded for seven leadership actions.  Of the eight design teams previously studied, there were 325 total leadership behaviors coded.  A follower-to-leader behavior pattern was defined where a follower in one behavior immediately exhibited leadership behavior in the next coded activity.  Of the activities coded, 131 (40.3%) possible follower helping actions have been identified. These are examined further to determine whether there is a correlation between the initial leadership behavior type and the following leadership behavior type.  Patterns are also sought to determine how often the initial leader also changes to a follower in the subsequent activity.  This study shows that there are follower patterns that are found in design activities.  Further, these patterns are related back to the follower (helping) behavior model that is derived from the literature, specifically the influence tactics that include:  inspirational appeals, consultation, LMX, TMX, supplication, and exemplification.  Finally, this study provides sufficient evidence of patterns occurring from the previous study data to motivate future systematic study of followership in engineering design.


Follower Behavior in Engineering Design Teams: Theoretical Constructs and Protocol Analyses

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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