FRED LUTHANS is the University and the George Holmes Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is also a senior research scientist for HUMANeX Ventures Inc. He received his B.A., M.B.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, where he received the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2002. While serving as an officer in the U.S. Army from 1965 to 1967, he taught leadership at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He has been a visiting scholar at a number of colleges and universities and has lectured in numerous European and Pacific Rim countries. He has taught international management as a visiting faculty member at the universities of Bangkok, Hawaii, Henley in England, Norwegian Management School, Monash in Australia, Macau, Chemnitz in Germany, and Tirana in Albania.
A past President of the Academy of Management, in 1997 he received the Academy's Distinguished Educator Award. In 2000 he became an inaugural member of the Academy's Hall of Fame for being one of the "Top Five" all-time published authors in the prestigious academy journals. For many years he was co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of World Business and editor of Organizational Dynamics and is currently co-editor of Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies. The author of numerous books, his seminal Organizational Behavior is now in its thirteenth edition and the 2007 groundbreaking book Psychological Capital (Oxford University Press) with Carolyn Youssef and Bruce Avolio came out in a new version in 2015. He is one of very few management scholars who is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the Decision Sciences Institute, and the Pan Pacific Business Association.
He received the Global Leadership Award from the Pan Pacific Association and has been a member of its Executive Committee since it was founded over 30 years ago. This committee helps organize the annual meeting held in Pacific Rim countries. He has been involved with some of the first empirical studies on motivation and behavioral management techniques and the analysis of managerial activities in Russia; these articles were published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business, and European Management Journal. Since the very beginning of the transition to market economies after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, he has been actively involved in management education programs sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development in Albania and Macedonia, and in U.S. Information Agency programs involving the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
Professor Luthans's recent international research involves his construct of positive psychological capital (PsyCap). For example, he and colleagues have published their research demonstrating the impact of Chinese workers' PsyCap on their performance in the International Journal of Human Resource Management and Management and Organization Review. He is applying his positive approach to positive organizational behavior (POB), PsyCap, and authentic leadership to effective global management and has been the keynote at programs in China (numerous times), Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Mexico, Chile, Fiji, Germany, France, England, Spain, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Macedonia, Albania, Morocco, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.
