Academic and expert in the behaviour of organisations;

born June 10, 1930; died September 26, 2006.

ROY Wilkie, emeritus professor of organisational behaviour at Strathclyde University, died suddenly and peacefully at home.

He was an inspirational teacher and an influential thinker about management who insisted on the fundamental importance of moral issues in all human relationships, both within the workplace and without.

He would look to novels, film, theatre and poetry to understand human thinking and behaviour. Watching the relationship between Jack Nicholson and Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or watching exchanges in 12 Angry Men conveyed a sense of immediacy about management and leadership in organisations that he knew textbooks could not provide.

His genius as a teacher was that he always seemed to be talking directly to the students about things he managed to make important and relevant. He encouraged questions and met them with more questions. He was interested in developing his students' capacity for thinking and reflection. As one former student put it, he had a rare capacity for making people think of possibilities.

Roy's commitment to teaching and to people extended beyond the university and he was involved in research and consultancy in a variety of organisations. At the invitation of Joe Beattie, the deputy commandant, Roy revolutionised police management training at the Scottish Police College in the 1980s. He made the previously disliked management part of the selected sergeants' course its most popular class.

Through the 22 command courses he ran, Roy was to have a profound impact on the education of a generation of senior officers, and he guided several future chief constables through Masters and PhD study. In turn, this access to so many aspects of policing made possible the establishment in 1982 at Strathclyde University of the Centre for Police Studies, the first of its kind in the UK.

Born in Rutherglen, and living there most of his life, he was educated at Rutherglen Academy and read philosophy at Aberdeen, winning the Logic Prize. After National Service - which he loathed, regarding the army as a model of how not to organise people - Roy worked for the Workers' Educational Association and in management consultancy before being appointed in 1962 to the post of senior research fellow at what was then the Royal College of Science and Technology. He became reader and head of the department of administration in 1967, was made professor in 1974, and became emeritus professor in 1995.

Philosophy informed all his work and gave him a passion for clear thinking and writing. He was an individualist; one of his colleagues described as an intellectual rather than an academic. Roy accepted the description with enthusiasm but therein lay a problem. His approach to work was in a sense self-contained. He was intensely collaborative and most of his publications are coauthored. But he didn't rely on or seek the approval of the wider academic community. This meant his academic reputation would never reflect his worth and the standing in which he was held by those who had worked with him.

His published output was relatively small, but he coauthored many articles and two books, The Concept of Organisation (1974) with David Bradley, and Managing the Police: Law, Organisation and Democracy (1986) with David Bradley and Neil Walker.

His interest in how people were and should be treated was never merely theoretical. He believed everyone should be valued: janitors and cleaners as well as chief executives, children as well as adults, students as well as teachers.

Roy engaged with virtually everybody he met, and did so with the kind of honest interest that tends to be reciprocated. He was consequently wellinformed, and first learned of the faculty's plan to move his office from the woman who dusted the dean's desk.

Roy was the first student into communist China in 1949 and he visited Hungary in 1950. He was a socialist, and a founder member of the breakaway Scottish Labour Party, but his thinking could never accommodate authoritarianism. He wrote a paper in the early seventies, entitled The Assassination of Stalin, parts of which were published in Strathclyde University Gazette and The Glasgow Review. In 2005, he updated this in an unpublished paper, The Death of Stalin, which took into account the mass of publications after glasnost.

Over the years, Roy's passion for life took many forms: from his sponsorship of the only edition of the PopularArts Review in 1972, to his pride at being one of the founding members of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. He regularly attended Parkhead during Jock Stein's reign but reserved his highest regard for Denis Law. Roy swam almost every day. His abiding love was jazz and he once helped to carry Charles Moffett's drum kit through the Paris Metro in 1966 while trying to persuade Ornette Coleman to bring his trio to Scotland. At Glasgow's Jazz Record Club, he scandalised audiences by talking about the music and by interrupting it to do so.

Roy is survived by his wife, Jill, whom he married in 1957, his children, Jacqueline, Lauren, Sean and Moya, and his eight grandchildren.