Fred Luthans


Fred Luthans is a management professor specializing in organizational behavior. He is the University and George Holmes Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Education

Luthans graduated from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in mathematics in 1961, an MBA in 1962, and a Ph.D. in management and psychology in 1965. Iowa Professors Henry Albers and Max Wortman were his PhD academic advisers. He took post-doctoral seminars in management at Columbia University while serving in the United States Army stationed at the United States Military Academy, West Point.

Academic career

After serving as an Army captain teaching psychology and leadership to cadets at West Point from 1965–1967, Luthans joined the faculty of the Department of Management at the University of Nebraska, where he remained for his entire academic career. In 1986, he was elected president of the Academy of Management. In 1997, he received the Academy's Distinguished Management Educator Award and in 2017 received the Organizational Behavior Division's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Research

As a scholar of management, Luthans applied behavioral science for the purpose of managing human behavior in organizations. His textbook Organizational Behavior, now in its 14th edition, has been widely used over the years.
Luthans’s initial research applied theories associated with positive reinforcement and behaviorism to improving employee performance. A meta-analysis mainly consisting of studies he and colleagues conducted indicated a strong relationship between his concept of "organizational behavior modification" and improved employee performance in both manufacturing and service organizations.
In the 1980s, Luthans conducted observational, qualitative/mixed method research on what managers do in their day-to-day activities. His research showed the importance of playing the game in order to get ahead in organizations. This research was summarized in the Luthans, Hodgetts & Rosenkrantz book "Real Managers" and has recently been updated and re-published as "Real Managers Revisited" by Hogan Assessment Systems, Inc, 2019.
In the 1990s, with globalization taking the forefront in the management field, Luthans’s research also took on an international focus and resulted in his 1991 book International Management. Luthans previous work in both behavioral management and managerial activities were tested in other cultures, mainly Asia and Eastern Europe. During this period he also focused on taking Bandura's social learning theories and research to the workplace. This work culminated in the widely cited meta-analysis with Alex Stajkovic which found a strong relationship between self-efficacy and work-related performance. This research served as a foundation and point of departure for his now well known positive approach to leading, managing and developing for improved employees/teams performance and well-being.
Luthans founded and with colleagues conducted research on positive psychological capital, or PsyCap. This second-order, core construct of PsyCap is composed of the criteria meeting first-order psychological resources of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism or the "HERO Within". The initial research found that overall PsyCap is more closely related to both performance and satisfaction than is each of the individual components. Through basic research published in peer-reviewed academic journals, Luthans and colleagues research have demonstrated that PsyCap is open to development and can be improved with self- and group training and is significantly related to desired work-related attitudes, behaviors and performance, and more recently various dimensions of well-being. This research effort has resulted in Luthans recognition by the Web of Science as being in the Top 1% of Citations of researchers in all fields in the world and, in a 2018 analysis conducted by Aguinis et al. published in AMLE, he was found to be #1 in citations in Organizational Behavior textbooks. In the Spring of 2020, his Google Scholar Profile indicates over 85,000 citations, h-index of 106, and i-10 index of 263.

Selected bibliography