Exploring the use of the competing values framework in engineering education As shown by the rapid increase in engineering programs offering formal leadership training, the call for more engineers as leaders is being answered. Opportunities for engineers to be leaders will only grow with the need for technical judgement in economic, social, and environmental decision-making, according to the National Academy of Engineering, or NAE (2004). Furthermore, the NAE acknowledges that engineers with business and management expertise have more opportunities to serve as leaders. In an effort to better understand leadership development in different settings, we turned to industry models of measuring leadership effectiveness, which can inform engineering education (Borrego et al., 2013). Behavioral complexity, or the capacity of an individual to utilize a variety of behaviors, each best suited to a given setting (Lawrence et al., 2009) is described through the Competing Values Framework (CVF) theory. This theory is the source for the Managerial Behavior Instrument (MBI), an empirically tested measure of leadership effectiveness (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1981; Lawrence et al., 2009). The CVF describes roles and behaviors in four quadrants: collaborate, create, control, and compete. The resulting information, however, is not dichotomous, but rather acknowledges that an individual can express strong behaviors in multiple quadrants leading to behavioral complexity, a correlate to higher leadership effectiveness. This research involves administering a survey, which includes a modified MBI, to engineering students working in self-managed teams on a substantial project. Initial data comes from students in a curricular capstone design course. Subsequent data will include data from students working on a substantial project in a co-curricular setting. Each group will be surveyed twice by January, with the goal of exploring the level of complexity of student leadership behavior. The MBI survey was modified where necessary to apply to an ...