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Abstract
US companies spend approximately $14 billion dollars annually on leadership development. Although leadership skills provide a future competitive advantage against industry rivalry, technology and engineering industries have concluded that technical skills are not enough to drive business to a leading place in the those markets. As a result, traditional methods of teaching leadership have shown poor outcomes. According to McKinsey, absence of embedding leadership development in real work and failing to apply the right leadership in the right context are the cause for failure in leadership development. Charles J. Pellerin illustrates a great method for analyzing, improving and managing behavior and performance of individuals and teams called 4-D system. In this study we enhance the 4-D system by using experiential learning in cases that reflect different business environments. This experiential learning is developed by using open simulator enterprise systems where we can represent human beings by avatars that can be managed and dramatized by actual people. In addition, these avatars can be combined with other avatars managed by scripted behaviors, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) with many leadership scenarios obtained from real cases. This paper presents an introduction and background to leadership and discusses a novel methodology using live, virtual and constructive simulation. This methodology allows engineers to learn and practice leadership in a synthetic environment by using real cases instead of the traditional methods. Engineers will feel and live the real working environment through interactions with other peers, subordinates and other non-engineering workers.
Keywords
Leadership, simulation, avatars, engineering education, training
1. Introduction
Leadership skills are one of the crucial traits to succeed in many revenues of life. The conception of leadership is said to be the great man theory [1]. Leadership can be gained by experience as well obtained by training. In a study conducted by the chemical engineering department of the Universitat Rovira I Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, it was founded that certain framework can be used to facilitate the appearance of leadership skills such as cooperation, interpersonal communication, and commitment to achieve the goals. The results also indicate that the students' leadership effectiveness was perceived as satisfactory [2]. This study concludes to us as researchers that leadership can be taught in universities. However, technical courses are not enough to prepare engineering students...