POBI

Dr. Fred Luthans is an internationally recognized, long-time organizational behavior (OB) professor at the University of Nebraska. He authored the first mainline OB text in 1973 and was elected by his peers as President of the Academy of Management in 1985-86. Initially his best-known research centered around behavioral performance management (OB Mod books with Kreitner, 1975. 1985).  Then at the turn of the century, he founded and wrote the seminal articles (2002a, 2002b) on what he termed Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) and soon after the seminal articles (2004 with Senior POBI Fellow Carolyn Youssef-Morgan and 2004 with POBI Fellows and sons Brett and Kyle Luthans) on Psychological Capital or simply PsyCap (books with Senior POBI Fellows Bruce Avolio and Carolyn Youssef-Morgan (2007, 2015, Oxford University Press).Luthans was stimulated by and drew from the then just emerging positive psychology movement. As a Gallup Senior Research Scientist, in 1999 Fred participated in the first Positive Psychology Summit held at then Gallup Headquarters in his hometown of Lincoln, NE.

The scientific criteria Luthans set for PsyCap were that the positive psychological resource must be based on theory and research, have valid measurement, be state-like and thus be open to development, and Increase well-being and performance. The positive psychological resources which were determined to best meet these inclusion criteria were: Hope, Efficacy (confidence), Resilience, and Optimism (or the HERO within). Luthans and his colleagues (especially those listed as POBI Fellows) then proceeded to do the basic research, theory building and publications in the top peer-review academic journals. They initially focused on the individual level aimed at desirable workplace attitudes, behaviors, and, especially, performance. However, in recent years he has been giving increased attention to mental and physical well-being and to research refinements such as mediation/moderation, with POBI Fellow Peter Harms validation of an implicit alternative measure to the self-report PCQ-12 and 24 and with POBI’s Founder & President Julie Broad, application at team (collective or cPsyCap) and with POBI Fellow Dianne Welsh organizational (or oPsyCap) levels and more domains such as in the military, education, health care, public sector, sports and across cultures globally. This extensive and continually expanding body of theory and research serves as the foundation for PsyCap which is now recognized and cited by all OB, I-O and positive psychology scholars. Fred has recently been notified that he is on the Web of Science Top 1% of Cited Researchers in the world and the #1 cited in Organizational Behavior texts and an H index of 120, approaching 150,000 citations, and i-10 of almost 300.