Bruce Avolio

About

Bruce Avolio is a Professor of Management at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business, holding the Mark Pigott Chair in Business Strategic Leadership. He has been with the university since 2008 and has held various academic and leadership positions, including Professor of Management at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Director of the Gallup Leadership Institute. His educational background includes a PhD from the University of Akron, an MA from the same institution, and a BA from the State University of New York. His expertise encompasses gamification, global business, leadership, organizational behavior, and organizational transformation. Avolio's research focuses on leadership development, ethical leadership, psychological capital, and organizational change. He has contributed extensively to the field through his scholarly publications and has served in editorial roles for prominent journals such as the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies. Recognized for his contributions to leadership research, he has received numerous awards, including the International Leadership Association 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award and fellowships from the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Management, and the American Psychological Association. His work emphasizes understanding leadership mechanisms, fostering ethical conduct, and advancing strategic leadership transformation in organizations.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Public relations
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Law
• Epistemology
• Business

Selected publications

• Do employees' views matter in corporate governance? The relationship between employee approval and CEO dismissal

  Strategic Management Journal · 2022-10-21 · 41 citations

  article

  Abstract Research Summary As important stakeholders of a firm, employees are critical to firm success because they are directly engaged in strategy implementation. Accordingly, we theorize that employees' views can impact assessment of the CEO by the board of directors beyond firm financial performance and security analysts' recommendations. Specifically, we hypothesize that employee approval of a CEO's leadership is predictive of the board's CEO dismissal decision, particularly when there is re…

  PublisherDOI

• Behavioral Integrity: Examining the Effects of Trust Velocity and Psychological Contract Breach

  Journal of Business Ethics · 2020 · 38 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Walking Our Evidence-Based Talk: The Case of Leadership Development in Business Schools

  Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies · 2022 · 36 citations

  Academics have lamented that practitioners do not always adopt scientific evidence in practice, yet while academics preach evidence-based management (EBM), they do not always practice it. This paper extends prior literature on difficulties to engage in EBM with insights from behavioral integrity (i.e., the study of what makes individuals and collectives walk their talk). We focus on leader development, widely used but often critiqued for lacking evidence. Analyzing 60 interviews with academic di…

  PublisherDOI

• How leader and follower prototypical and antitypical attributes influence ratings of transformational leadership in an extreme context

  Human Relations · 2020-09-30 · 33 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Leadership is a process where leaders enact certain behaviors to influence followers. Yet, each follower may view the leader’s enactment differently, owing to differences in disposition and context. Here we examine leadership as a property attributed by followers to their leader, influenced by both the leader and followers’ personal attributes and the situation in which leaders and followers interact. Guiding this study, we asked: how do followers’ affect (negative and positive traits), motivati…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Unpacking Psychological Ownership: How Transactional and Transformational Leaders Motivate Ownership

  Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies · 2022 · 30 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Psychological ownership represents feelings of responsibility for and possession over a target, which can be both tangible in terms of physical resources, or intangible regarding one's relationships. Here we examine how two well-established leadership styles can trigger six different facets of psychological ownership and their corresponding ownership behaviors, by using regulatory focus and identity theory to explain how psychological ownership emerges and influences an individual's work behavio…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Fred O. Walumbwa

  37 shared

• Fred Luthans

  34 shared

• Sean T. Hannah

  Wake Forest University

  33 shared

• Surinder S. Kahai

  23 shared

• John J. Sosik

  Pennsylvania State University

  22 shared

• Bernard M. Bass

  21 shared

• David A. Waldman

  Arizona State University

  17 shared

• Carolyn M. Youssef

  Bellevue University

  11 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Organizational Behavior

  University of Washington

  1989

• M.S., Industrial Engineering

  University of Washington

  1985

• B.S., Industrial Engineering

  University of Washington

  1983

Awards & honors

• International Leadership Association 2024 Lifetime Achieveme…
• Named a Fellow of the American Psychological Society (2009)
• Named a Fellow of the Academy of Management (2009)
• Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Society fo…
• SUNY-Binghamton Award for Distinguished Scholarly Research (…

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• Philip Bondh-75
• Christopher M. Barnesh-43
• Warren Boekerh-30