Walt Sowden

Walt Sowden is a Lecturer of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where his research and teaching center on the psychology of organizational behavior and leadership, morality, and mental health and fitness in high-stakes environments. A retired U.S. Army officer with nearly three decades of operational and research experience, he studies the moral dimensions of human experience in both military and organizational life.

His current scholarship explores the paradox of loyalty, the psychology of betrayal, and the ways individuals navigate obligations, trust, and ethical tensions within relationships. He is also advancing a framework of meta-cognitive morality, investigating how people reflect on and regulate their own moral judgments. Building on this, his research on moral injury examines how violations of deeply held moral expectations, whether through betrayal, complicity, or omission, shape psychological outcomes across contexts.

Dr. Sowden has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and numerous book chapters and trade publications, with work informing both theory and practice in moral psychology, leadership, and behavioral health. He is particularly committed to translating insights on moral decision-making to improve the well-being of military service members, veterans, and organizational leaders facing volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous challenges.

Walt holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Michigan, an MA in Organizational Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a BA in Sociology from South Dakota State University. Over a 28-year Army career, he held operational and research leadership roles, including Company Commander in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tactical Officer and Instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Principal Investigator of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research’s Operational Research Team, and Director of Research for the Department of Behavioral Health at Tripler Army Medical Center, Honolulu, Hawai’i.

At Michigan Ross, he teaches courses on Organizational Behavior, Leadership Development, and Negotiation across undergraduate, MBA, and executive education programs. He has also taught West Point’s capstone course in moral leadership and professional identity formation (MX400), as well as courses in moral psychology, social psychology, and health psychology at the University of Michigan and the University of Hawai’i.