They’re detail-oriented, analytical and trained in systematic problem-solving. Engineers’ basic qualities make them good candidates for the top.

The corporate titans who lead Australia’s top 50 companies are as likely to have degrees in engineering as ones in business or economics, according to a recent Leading Company analysis. Nor is it only Australian mining conglomerates where engineers are rising to the top. Around the world a combination of engineering experience with an MBA from a top business school tends to be a common path to the corner office. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is an engineer. So are General Motors’ Mary Barra and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and the list goes on.

In fact, engineering long has ranked as the most common undergraduate degree among Fortune 500 CEOs. Even Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has an engineering Ph.D under his belt.

Why do engineers end up leading companies? Is it because engineers as such are CEO material, or is it because they are more likely to have changes of heart during their careers? If so, why, how and when does this occur?

In spite of engineering’s long and glorious history — think Thomas Edison, John Frank Stevens, Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover — there have been stereotypical image problems associated with the profession. Engineers have often been identified as technical geeks, socially maladroit but excelling at math and physics, although all along many engineers have displayed the kind of socially desirable traits that eventually earn them the awe of their boards of directors.

Engineers, in general, are good at attention to detail, problem-solving, numeracy, risk management and analysis. On the flip side, many may lack emotional intelligence and the necessary leadership, people-management and communication abilities, soft skills which can be addressed by training to assist their transition into the management arena.

What motivates engineers to depart from technically-oriented career paths and make their way to the boardroom? Of more than 300 responses to an online survey I conducted with 1,280 top-level executives holding engineering degrees, the overwhelming reason for moving up was money.

Despite engineering being one of the more financially rewarding professions, many of the engineers-turned-CEOs we surveyed noted that lawyers and bankers make vast multiples of what engineers do. We live in a world in which the monetary value of professionals does not always correlate with the magnitude of value they create for society — nurses, teachers and NGO representatives are important value creators, for example, yet they make little compared to, say, investment bankers —and high pay seems to rank highly as a motivation for pursuing a management position.

As Rita Davenport once said, “Money is not everything, but it ranks up there with oxygen.”

Another group of engineers said that their focus had changed after they realised that a traditional engineering job no longer satisfied the desires that originally had led them to pursue that career path. In fact, some discovered that they never had felt a genuine desire to be an engineer in the first place.

The prevailing wisdom in many parts of the world, especially developing ones, is that high-achieving students ought to enrol in either medical or engineering schools. There seems to be a widespread assumption that taking on medical or engineering studies is far more difficult than studying the humanities or social sciences. Some of the executives we surveyed admitted that, since engineers enjoy one of the lowest unemployment rates, engineering always has been perceived as a safe starting major for anyone, providing graduates with a set of skills that cannot be faked and which open doors for professional advancement.

Other recorded reasons for pursuing leadership positions included disillusionment with harsh working conditions for engineers — the life of an engineer, it seems, is not as rosy as originally anticipated. For others, though, it’s not so much that engineering was a wrong career choice as it is a change of interest from a curiosity-driven fascination with how things work to a desire to make a difference or to acquire self-esteem.

One of the counterintuitive findings of this survey was that most CEOs do not reach their position as part of natural career progression, but rather through actively pursuing a management role. The reality is that engineers often are promoted on the basis of their engineering accomplishments and technical merits, rather than their management abilities. One of the oft-neglected complications of such practices is that engineers have a tendency to think that, in any decision, the choices boil down to “their way” or “the wrong way.” This explains why engineers-turned-CEOs have a tendency to be ineffective delegaters who adopt a micromanagement style.

While many career changes are spurred by a perception that “the grass is greener on the other side,” most career transitions boil down to individual preferences and market conditions. These appear to be strongly geographically dependent, sector-specific and gender-oriented.

Additionally, the length of time spent in a technical role is expected to vary from one CEO to another. Once an engineer moves into the realms of the executive, however, it is highly unlikely that he or she ever will return to a more practical role.

Not all engineers are cut out to be executives, of course. Many bright engineers develop no interest whatsoever in attaining a leadership position. This is not necessarily a bad thing, given the high proportion of corporate psychopaths in the C-Suite. Mainstream engineers’ characteristics, it appears, don’t figure highly in the spectrum of psychopathic tendencies — until they become CEOs, at least.

Yasser Al-Saleh is a senior research fellow at the international business

school Insead.

© 2014 Insead