Leadership Characteristics within the Making Community

Makers are those who enjoy creating things and learning new skills, as well as interacting within a connected community (Doughtery, 2012). Through the analysis of Makers as part of a larger study (Jordan & Lande, 2013) a researcher had noticed the emergence of leadership traits within the Maker community (Oplinger, Jordan, and Lande, 2015). The National Academy of Engineering has determined that leadership is a key quality for the engineer of the future (Clough, 2004). The Engineering Accreditation Commission has determined several necessary outcomes for engineering students that coincide with leadership roles (Engineering Accreditation Commission, 2012). Proactiveness, confidence, motivation, communication, coaching will be important skills for engineers so that they can effectively lead teams, adjust to change, and synthesize (Ahn, Cox, London, Cekic, and Zhu, 2014). In National Academy of Engineering's The Engineer of 2020 (Clough, 2004) future engineers are expected to be in position to influence "in the making of public policy and in the administration of government and industry." The Maker community offers a broad spectrum of individuals engaged in informal engineering and tinkering activities across multiple pathways (Foster, Wigner, Lande, and Jordan, 2015). This study explores leadership using a theoretical framework of competing values (Quinn, 1988) (Zafft, Adams, and Matkin, 2009) including relating to people, managing processes, leading change, and producing results. The study relies upon artifact elicitation (based on photo elicitation (Harper, 2002)) with 40 of these Makers at four Maker Faires in the United States. The artifact elicitation interviews were conducted at the Maker Faires in front of participants' inventions, where the Makers were asked to describe the invention and the process behind it. Using a theoretical framework of competing values (Quinn, 1988) (Quinn, Faerman, Thompson, and McGrath, 1990) and through parallel inductive-deductive analysis, the emergent themes among our sample of Makers include that they express leadership qualities of (1) innovators \u2014 they utilize different skillsets to develop unique products and solutions; (2) monitors \u2014 they evaluate projects and respond to results; (3) directors \u2014 they set goals and expectations of their projects and processes; and (4) producers \u2014 they are determined and possess a personal drive. From the findings a call to action is made on implementing leadership lessons in the engineering classroom.