Faculty Teaching Award
This award is presented annually to an ASU faculty member who delivers an educational experience that creates impactful, transformative narratives regarding issues facing the world and expands the minds of students to help discover innovative solutions.
Christopher Neck, an acclaimed professor with expertise in leadership and management, is this year’s recipient of the Faculty Teaching Achievement Award.
- Instructed nearly 80,000 students across decades of teaching at ASU and Virginia Tech.
- Wrote defining texts that have shaped the leadership and management fields, including co-authoring “Self-Leadership: The Definitive Guide to Personal Excellence.”
- Earned numerous student-nominated distinctions and teaching awards, such as the 2024 W. P. Carey Huizingh Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher Award.
Christopher Neck earned his PhD in management with a concentration in organizational behavior in 1993 from Arizona State University. Since then, he has built an influential career as a scholar, educator and academic leader.
Neck is currently a Professor of Management in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship at the W. P. Carey School of Business, where he began in August 2009 after more than 15 years of teaching at Virginia Tech. His teaching portfolio spans undergraduate and master’s courses, with expertise in principles of management, organizational behavior, leadership, human resource management, strategic management, organization theory and entrepreneurship. A specialist in large-scale instruction, he has taught sections of up to 2,500 students and, over his career, has taught nearly 80,000 learners. He currently coordinates the department’s MGT 300 principles of management course.
Throughout his teaching career, Neck has earned numerous awards for teaching excellence. He received the 2007 International Business Week Favorite Professor Award, was a semifinalist for the 2020 Baylor University Cherry Award — one of the world’s premier teaching honors — and earned the 2024 W. P. Carey Huizingh Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher Award, among several other student-nominated distinctions. From 2009 to 2015, he served as a University Master Teacher at ASU, creating teaching resources for faculty and mentoring students in academic and career development.
A highly regarded researcher, Neck studies employee and executive fitness, self-leadership, emotional self-regulation, group decision-making processes, self-managing teams and more. His scholarly impact includes more than 16,000 Google Scholar citations, 119 refereed journal articles, 31 books and 47 conference presentations. He co-authored “Self-Leadership: The Definitive Guide to Personal Excellence,” the foundational text in the discipline, and developed the Revised Self-Leadership Questionnaire (RLSQ), which is used internationally. His textbooks have been adopted by approximately 1,000 colleges and used by more than 100,000 students. In recognition of his research productivity, he received the 2025 W. P. Carey Excellence in Research summer grant.
Neck has published 19 peer-reviewed teaching-related articles, delivered global webinars on teaching effectiveness and contributed to numerous book chapters and professional publications, including national media outlets such as USA Today, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. His service record includes work on the W.P. Carey Undergraduate Academic Standards Committee, the W. P. Carey Faculty Council and multiple faculty review committees. He has also served as editor of “Administrative Sciences,” deputy editor of the “Journal of Leadership and Management” and an ad hoc reviewer for leading management journals.