The management tree of life - An aid for undergraduate engineers to structure management thinking

Abstract

Both members of industry and expert panels continue to call loudly for increasing the ability of engineering undergraduates to effectively lead and work within diverse teams. Yet few engineering programs have a formal approach to providing students with the knowledge of management, human motivation, and organizations essential for understanding how to lead effectively. Instead, programs generally look to electives and general education requirements to fill this gap. This paper examines a path where management material is incorporated into the core curriculum of an Industrial Engineering program and offered to other engineers as a professional elective to meet their degree requirements. For most students, the course is their first exposure to the theoretical underpinnings of management and organizations. Since these materials are quite different than those of traditional engineering courses, students often either: 1) View the material as 'fluff' that is not important to their ability to be an effective engineer and/or 2) Have a great deal of difficulty absorbing the material due its foreign nature. To combat the second issue, a novel adaptation of a concept map tool was employed to assist students to frame their new knowledge in an engineering context. The approach was deployed in a manner many have seen in other contexts - family trees. The article exams the formative assessment of student performance on the trees and the impact of this intervention on student performance in subsequent summative assessments. Since the map was an optional assignment, the study provides a control group for comparisons.