Thomas C. Vandiver Bicentennial Chair in Business, Professor, Director, Center For Executive Succession
Patrick Wright is Thomas C. Vandiver Bicentennial Chair of Business in the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina and the Founder and Director of the Center for Executive Succession which partners with over 40 companies to conduct research on CEO succession. Prior to joining UofSC he has served on the faculties at Cornell University, Texas A&M University and the University of Notre Dame.
Professor Wright teaches, conducts research, and consults in the area of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM), particularly focusing on how firms use people as a source of competitive advantage, the changing nature of the Chief HR Officer role, and the Issues, challenges, and best practices in CEO succession. He has published over 80 research articles in journals, over 60 chapters in books and edited volumes and has co-authored two textbooks and two books on HR practice. He recently completed his 3-year term as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Management. According to Google Scholar he is currently the third most cited scholar on the UofSC campus (over 56,000 citations). In addition, in a study of scholarly impact in management he was listed in the top 1% of all management scholars worldwide.
He has conducted programs and/or consulted for a number of large organizations. He currently serves as a member on the Board of Directors for the Society for Human Resource Management and the National Academy of Human Resources (NAHR) and is a former board member of HRPS, SHRM Foundation and World at Work (formerly American Compensation Association). In 2005 he was named a Fellow in the National Academy of HR, and from 2011 to 2019 he has been named by HRM Magazine as one of the 20 “Most Influential Thought Leaders in HR”. In 2014, he won SHRM’s Michael R. Losey for Human Resource Research Award and in 2017 he won the Herb Heneman Career Achievement Award in the HR Division of the Academy of Management.
Education
Ph.D, Business Administration, Michigan State University, 1988
MBA, Michigan State University, 1987
BA Psychology, Wheaton College, 1982