UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. –– When Linda Treviño was a graduate student at Texas A&M in the 1980s, she was struck by the number of business scandals in the news and how there was almost no research about why organizations and their leadership behaved that way.
“The study of business ethics wasn't really recognized,” she said. “It was thought to be the province of philosophers.”
Four decades after she began to explore ethical behavior as a student, Treviño, distinguished professor of organizational behavior and ethics in the Penn State Smeal College of Business, has been honored by the Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division with a lifetime achievement award, which recognizes her unique career path and significant contributions to both academia and the business world.
She is the second Smeal College of Business professor to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Management, joining Evan Pugh University Professor and the Smeal Chaired Professor of Management Don Hambrick. The academy has more than 21,000 members across 120 countries and is the leading association for management and organizational scholars.
“It's very humbling,” said Treviño, who plans to retire in 2027, of the honor. “It feels very validating of all the hard work, all the weekends, all the rejections from journals. It took me a couple of days to absorb it.”
Treviño is regarded as the founder of behavioral ethics literature. As one of her nominators for the award wrote: "If there was a Mount Rushmore of organizational behavior ethics scholars, Linda’s face would be etched in the center of it."
Her interest and efforts stem from a paper she wrote during a master’s course in organizational behavior and from the model of ethical decision making she developed during her time at Texas A&M. It began when she learned of a socialization theory by Lawrence Kohlberg, a developmental psychologist at Harvard University.
“Most adults get to a level of development that [Kohlberg] calls conventional,” Treviño said. “If you're in a work organization, you look to your peers, you look to your boss. You look at the rules. But there are some people who arrive at a level he calls principled, where they're making decisions more for themselves.”
Treviño’s early efforts into researching ethics, however, came with challenges, chief among them the resistance she encountered from corporations when she asked to discuss ethics with their employees. She circumvented this by forming relationships with ethics and compliance officers and attending their organizational meetings.
In 1995, she published a textbook, “Managing Business Ethics,” along with Katherine Nelson, an assistant professor at the Fox School of Business at Temple University. Now in its ninth edition, it has been used by instructors in both undergraduate and graduate courses, including Smeal associate dean for undergraduate education Jennifer Eury, who has published multiple papers with Treviño, including one on creating a culture of honor and integrity in a business school in the Journal of Management Education in 2019. Eury credited Treviño with helping to foster a culture of ethics within Smeal and often borrows one of her metaphors to describe it to students.
“Ethical culture is a lot like a garden,” said Eury, who served as the college’s honor and integrity director from 2014 to 2017. “When you step away from the garden, the weeds grow. And unless you continue to tend it, you’re not going to have the garden that you had hoped to have. And that's a lot like an ethical culture; you need to continue to tend to it, and it's not just the gardener, it's not just the CEO, it's not just the dean, it's everyone in the community.”
Smeal emphasizes ethics across its curriculum in large part because of Treviño, said Alvin H. Clemens Professor Stephen Humphrey.
“From a values perspective, she’s the one who has made ethics and integrity so core to who we are,” said Humphrey, the chair of Smeal’s Department of Management and Organization.
Treviño was elected an Academy of Management Fellow in 2007 and has served the academy as program chair, division chair, ombudsman and associate editor of Academy Management Review, which awarded her with best paper in 1993 for her article on the social implications of punishment in organizations. She has served on the editorial boards of more than a dozen journals or publications in her field and consulted for numerous for-profit and non-profit organizations.
Her impact as a teacher might be the most far-reaching, however. Among Treviño’s numerous former students who have gone on to hold organizational leadership positions is Frederik Wenzel, the president and CEO of Schuetz Container Systems.
Wenzel took Treviño’s ethics and social responsibility course and she was his faculty adviser. After he graduated in 1991, she served as an informal adviser to him throughout his career and in 2022, he made a gift to establish the Linda Treviño Excellence in Business Ethics Program Fund Endowment. Wenzel said one of Treviño’s greatest strengths is getting people to think critically.
“When you're presented with a critical situation, you can't start thinking about what is ethical, what's not,” Wenzel said. “Those muscles have to be built well before, so that in that crisis, you're really on automatic pilot.”
As she looks back on her career and the way organizations have put a greater emphasis on ethical behavior, Treviño said she has seen more examples of ethical leadership than unethical leadership, even if the latter typically draws more headlines.
“People actually like being led in an ethical direction,” Treviño said. “If I have a leader who is leading us in an ethical direction, I'm really happy. It takes some of the burden off of me.”
Whether they’ve been influenced by her work or directly by her teaching, there are many individuals in positions of leadership in business and academia who have and continue to put Treviño’s lessons into practice.
“It's not just about the number of publications, the number of citations, what her research index numbers are,” said Michelle Darnell, Tarriff Family Director of the Center for Business Ethics and Social Responsibility and the Smeal honor and integrity director. “Because of this type of research, she's having impact on people who are in positions to influence cultures in a variety of organizations. Her work is very much relevant to real problems that organizations are experiencing.”