Phyllis Tharenou

Phyllis Tharenou is an Australian organisational psychologist and management scholar whose research has focused on understanding women's career advancement, training and development effectiveness, and professionals' international careers. She is an Emerita Professor, having retired from full-time academic executive roles in 2021. Over a career spanning more than four decades, she combined research, teaching, senior academic leadership, and national research governance. She is widely cited for her contributions to the study of careers, gender and work, training and development, and influences on managerial advancement (e.g. mentor support, family structure and roles).

Tharenou served as Flinders University's acting vice-chancellor in mid-2019.

Education and career Tharenou began her academic career in the mid-1970s as a sessional lecturer while completing postgraduate study. In 1979, she was appointed as a teaching specialist at the Queensland Institute of Technology (QIT). During this period, she combined teaching with doctoral research and early scholarly publications on employee self-esteem in top journals of industrial/organizational (IO) psychology, such as the Journal of Applied Psychology and the Journal of Vocational Behavior.

In the late 1980s, she joined the University of Queensland as a lecturer, while also engaging in consulting and executive education. Her early research was published in international peer-reviewed journals in organisational behaviour and management, including the Journal of Organizational Behavior and the Academy of Management Journal. She also received an outstanding paper award from the Management Development Division at the Academy of Management annual meeting in the United States.

In the mid-1990s, Tharenou joined Monash University. Between 1994 and 2004, she was awarded four ARC Large or Discovery Grants as sole Chief Investigator.

Between the early 1990s and late 2000s, her research program focused on managerial career advancement, gender differences in careers, and linked work–family structure and flexible work practices, as well as on training and development (T&D) effectiveness.

Tharenou served as Executive Director of the Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences (SBE) division at the Australian Research Council (ARC) from 2008 to 2009, following in 2005 to 2007 her chairing and membership of the SBE College of Experts.

Executive university roles In 2010, Tharenou returned to university leadership from government research leadership as Executive Dean of a large multidisciplinary faculty at Flinders University. She held additional senior executive appointments, including as acting dean of a business school alongside her executive dean role. Following institutional restructuring, she was appointed vice president and executive dean of a multidisciplinary faculty. After 11 years in full-time academic executive positions, she retired in 2021 and was awarded the title of Emerita Professor. managerial training needs analysis, supervisory development programs, and developmental performance appraisal systems.

Training and development A strand of Tharenou's research on managerial and career advancement concerns the impact of training, examining relationships between training participation, organisational effectiveness, and performance outcomes. In her highly cited meta-analytic review co-authored with Alan Saks and Celia Moore, Tharenou (2007) revealed training was found to be more strongly associated with human resource and organisational performance than with financial performance. The review emphasizes the importance of contextual factors such as business strategy and human capital alignment. A 2001 empirical study further found that training motivation was a significant predictor of participation in training and development affected by the context.

Career advancement and gender A central focus of Tharenou's research concerns explaining gender differences in managerial career advancement, addressing the United Nations' sustainable development goal of gender equality in holding management and executive roles. Burgess and Tharenou (2002) published one of the most highly cited studies globally on women's low representation on corporate boards, establishing the baseline for why women are underrepresented in governance.

Tharenou's 1994 study (with Shane Latimer and Denise Conroy) analysed organisational and individual factors associated with advancement among women and men. For the first time structural equation modelling applied to gendered models provided actual statistical evidence for how women with the same qualifications as men did not advance at the same rate. Later work extended the examination of the roles of personal traits, informal social processes, human capital, and social capital on career progression. Tharenou's (2001) paper shifted the focus from women's failures to advance in management to how social and personal mechanisms differentially drive advancement for each gender. Her work also examined links between family structure and managerial advancement.

International careers and expatriation From the 2000s onward, Tharenou examined international careers and global mobility, particularly self-initiated expatriate professionals who relocate abroad independently of organisational assignment. Her research compared these workers with company-assigned expatriates and examined their career outcomes.

Her work also addressed gender in global mobility. A 2010 study in the Journal of Business Ethics examined ethical and career implications of women's self-initiated expatriation, finding that although participation rates may be similar to men's, career returns often differ.

In a 2020 conceptual review co-authored with Carol Kulik she extended her research on self-initiated expatriates to skilled migrants, developing a model of their organisational socialisation and reviewing evidence on workplace conditions and organisational responses. Subsequent systematic reviews examined the career advancement of skilled migrant and expatriate women and gender differences in their managerial career advancement.

Awards and honours

Elton Mayo Award (2001), from the Australian Psychological Society, recognising significant contributions to industrial and organisational psychology. Fellow, formerly Distinguished Scholar Award (1999), Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management. Outstanding Paper Award (1989), Management Education and Development Division of the US Academy of Management. Elected Fellow (2009) of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Ranked among leading scholars within the top 1% in the social sciences and humanities by Research.com based on citation-based metrics. Highly ranked scholar in the top 0.05% worldwide by Scholar GPS for lifetime productivity and impact over career, specifically in the specialties of Human Resource Management, International Business, and Gender and Women's Studies.

Selected works

Books

Journal articles

Book chapters