The leadership challenges engineers experience upon entering leadership role in motor industry within South Africa

Abstract

The aim of the paper was to investigate the challenges engineers experience upon entering leadership role in motor industry within South Africa (SA). Many studies have been conducted on leadership but none reveals the challenges upon entering leadership role especially on engineers within SA. The adopted methodology was a mixed method, which separate the population into two groups, those who participated in qualitative and those in quantitative. A questionnaire was constructed and self administered to 132 engineers and interview schedule with questions aligned to the aim of the paper was formulated before meetings of seven participants. Both instruments were written in English, a questionnaire took 10 minutes to complete, and interviews took 20 minutes. The study reveals that coaching teams, dealing with criticism from teams, to take ownership communication with teams and communicating effectively across teams were the major challenges for engineers in upon entering leadership role in the motor industry. The paper recommends that as part of development, engineer have needs to rotate among different business functions for not less than two years, which will give them enough practical and exposure and understanding the business functional.

Keywords: Leadership, engineers, Motor industry, South Africa, challenges.