Lifetime Achievement Awardee

Jerry Hunt’s (1932 – 2008) impact on the development of leadership studies as a field of inquiry cannot be underestimated. He was a one man association – organizing leadership conferences, shaping the field as the editor of the Journal of Management, and developing The Leadership Quarterly as the premier journal in the field – all while conducting and publishing his own scholarship, including Leadership: A New Synthesis, which was a book award finalist.

Hunt tirelessly mentored emerging scholars and championed the notion that academics should not just talk to each other, but should work to integrate and advance knowledge across domains. Through the Southern Illinois University biennial symposium on leadership research in the 1970s and 1980s, he gathered scholars to debate the most important questions facing the study of leadership and published the results in the Leadership Symposia Series – outlining a research agenda for the field for years to come.

He was founding director of Texas Tech University’s Institute for Leadership Research, a Fellow of the Academy of Management and chair of its Organizational Behavior Division, and served as president of the Southern Management Association, where the Sustained Outstanding Service Award is named after him.