Dr. Avolio holds the Mark Pigott Chair in Business Strategic Leadership and Executive Directorship, in the Center for Leadership & Strategic Thinking at the Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington. Dr. Avolio has been involved in advancing research and practice on leadership for over 30 years, balancing what he refers to as being both rigorous and relevant in terms of what we share with leaders and their organizations.
In terms of distinguished accomplishments, Dr. Avolio has been awarded fellowship status in the American Psychological Association, The Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology, The Gerontology Society, The Academy of Management Association and The International Association of Applied Psychology. He has also served as the Chair of the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management and the President of the SHRM Foundation. In 2012, he was identified as being in the top 25 management scholars over the last 50 years in terms of scholarly citations of his work. In 2016, he was also recognized for being among the top 3,000 scientists, across all scientific disciplines around the globe by Reuters.
Dr. Avolio has an international reputation as a researcher and practitioner in leadership. He has consulted with public and private organizations in North and South America, Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and Israel. His research and consulting has included projects with the militaries of the United States of America, Singapore, Sweden, Finland, Israel, and South Africa.
Dr. Avolio has published 12 books and over a 150 articles on leadership and related areas. His books include Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: The Road Ahead (Elsevier Science, 2002), Full Leadership Development: Building the Vital Forces in Organizations (Sage Publications, 1999), and Developing Potential Across a Full Range of Leadership: Cases on Transactional and Transformational Leadership (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000). His more recent books include Leadership Development in Balance: Made/Born (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, February 2005), The High Impact Leader: Moments Matter in Authentic Leadership Development (McGraw-Hill 2006), Psychological Capital: Developing the Human Competitive Edge (Oxford Press, 2007; 2015) with Fred Luthans and Carolyn Youssef, Full Range Leadership 2nd Edition (Sage Publications, 2011) and The No People: Tribal Tales of Organizational Cliff Dwellers (Information Age Publications, 2012), and his 12th book entitled Organizing Organizations: To Ascend the Arc of Sustainable Transformation with Chelley Patterson in Stanford University Press (forthcoming 2017).
Dr. Avolio’s latest interests include examining: how to accelerate authentic leadership development to maximize positive impact on performance using micro-interventions; how to assess the developmental readiness of individuals and organizations to foster transformative change; how to show organizational decision makers the ‘return on development’ investment in leadership; how to determine the methods analysts use to value leadership quality in estimating the financial worth of an organization; and how the field of leadership research and practice can use serious gaming, simulations and what he refers to as ‘gamulations” to foster strategic leadership development in organizations.
Over his career, Dr. Avolio has received external funding totaling in excess of 10 million dollars from the Army Research Institute, the U.S. Department of Education, NSF, NIH, the Kellogg Foundation, the Ludus Foundation, The Gallup Organization, the State Farm Foundation, Booze, Allen Hamilton, Alaska Airlines, National Correction Services of both the U.S. and Canada, in addition to funding for corporate projects around the globe including in countries such as Australia, Israel, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, South Africa, Canada, and Korea.