Podsakoff earned a Bachelor and a Master of Business Administration from California State University Fresno, and a Doctor of Business Administration from Indiana University in 1981, with a thesis "Performance models, microeconomics and schedule responding in humans.
He then joined the faculty of Ohio State University, and then came to Indiana University, where he spent most of his career. He became an Emeritus professor there in 2013, and joined the faculty of Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida as a visiting professor His principal research and teaching interest is in the area of leadership.
He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. In 2000, the Industrial/Organizational Psychologist (TIP) identified him as one of the 100 Most published authors in the Journal of Applied PSychology and Personnel Psychology in the 1990s. He was included in the Inter-Services Intelligence list of most cited authors in Business for each of the years 2003-2011. In 2004, he was awarded the William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award for the best publication in a refereed journal in the field of Industrial-Organizational Psychology. In 2013, he was awarded the Academy of Management"s Research Methods Division"s Lifetime Achievement Award. He served on the Editorial Boards for the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, Leadership Quarterly, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personnel Psychology.
