George Bearnard Graen is an American scholar and scientist in the field of leadership during on-boarding. He was awarded the James McKeen Cattell Award by the American Psychological Association as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota for the best research design in applied psychology and his doctoral dissertation was published as the only study in a special issue of the Journal of applied psychology. Another of his articles was the most requested reprint in ten years in Leadership Quarterly.

He was awarded the Illinois – Keio exchange distinguished professorship to Tokyo, Japan. He also garnered membership in the Center of Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was head of the Department of Management at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio and Gene Braun endowed Chair in Management at the University of Louisiana. He is well known globally for authoring his theory of the on-boarding worker procedure, LMX theory, which has been successful in many countries in empowering team startup coordination and retention. He is one of the most cited leadership scholars in the world.