John Kello is a Professor Emeritus of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Davidson College, with a Graduate Faculty Associate appointment to the Doctoral Program in Organizational Science at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Additionally, John is President of, and Senior Consultant with John E. Kello & Associates, Inc., an Organization Development (OD) consulting firm which serves a national list of clients.

John's research, teaching, and consulting interests center on the High-Performance Organization model and the development of sustainable positive organizational cultures. His work includes research and consulting with a focus in the areas of organizational communications (especially workplace meetings), leadership assessment and development (including executive coaching), and behavior-based safety systems to reduce error and promote safe work in a variety of industrial and medical settings. He has consulted with more than 100 governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, and business organizations in the fields of healthcare, energy, higher education, staffing, aggregates, heavy construction, manufacturing (a wide range of product types), product distribution, food service, commercial aviation, nuclear operations, and financial services.

John has given major invited addresses to a wide variety of national and international professional business groups, as well as to many local, regional, and national HR and OD professional associations, and academic departments of psychology and business.

He has published more than 100 articles in professional journals dealing with the creation of a “positive safety culture”, the design and implementation of effective workplace meetings (including After Action Reviews for first responder teams), the design and implementation of organizational training systems, team training and team development for airline cockpit and nuclear control room crews, staff training and development in academic institutions, and the impact of the philosophy of behaviorism on Industrial -Organizational psychology. He served for 15 years as a regular columnist for the Positive Cultures series in the international safety journal, industrial Safety & Hygiene News, publishing more than 80 columns over that period. He is the co-author of two recently published books, titled 5 Actions of Positive Accountability and The Burned Out Physician: Managing the Stress and Reducing the Errors.

John’s professional association memberships include: The American Psychological Association, The Association for Psychological Science (Fellow), Academy of Management, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Awards Committee Chair Emeritus), the North Carolina I-O Psychologists (Chair Emeritus), the OD Network, and the Carolinas OD Network.

John holds the B.S. Summa Cum Laude in Psychology from Old Dominion University, and the M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Duke University. He grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and lives with his family in the town of Davidson, NC, USA.