Bernard Bass

Bernard Morris Bass (1925 to 2007) was an American scholar in leadership studies and organizational behavior. He served as distinguished professor emeritus in the School of Management at Binghamton University, where he was the founding director of the Center for Leadership Studies, and he was founding editor in chief of the journal Leadership Quarterly. He is best known for his research on transformational leadership, an idea he developed building on the work of James MacGregor Burns, and for the widely used reference work known as the Bass Handbook of Leadership. He was a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Academy of Management, and by the time he retired from Binghamton University he was described as the most cited leadership scholar in the world. In 2018 the leadership center he helped found in 1987 was renamed in honor of him and his wife, Ruth.