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. From 2010 onward, Tharenou's research extended to international careers, beginning with the global mobility of self-initiated expatriates and later to other forms of global mobility, including skilled migration and the career advancement of skilled migrant and expatriate women. In doing so, her earlier research on managerial advancement, gender differences in career paths, and women in management was applied to international careers and skilled immigrants.
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.
Editorial, professional, and practitioner service Tharenou has held editorial roles in organisational psychology and management, serving as associate editor of Australian Psychologist, Applied Psychology: An International Review, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior. She has also served on editorial boards of major management and human resource journals and reviewed manuscripts for numerous international journals in industrial and organisational psychology, organisational behaviour, and human resource management. In addition, she has assessed applications for competitive research funding schemes as both a member of the College of Experts for Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences and as its Chair.
Research
Employee self-esteem and HRM research Tharenou's (1979) cited review of employee self-esteem during her doctoral research advocates for the study of context-specific, organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) rather than global self-esteem. The shift highlighted the impact of work experiences on self-worth and led to significant advancements in organisational psychology and the development of the concept of "organization-based self-esteem". The review's call for situation-specific measurement directly contributed to the development of the OBSE construct and influenced future research agendas in employee self-concept. Tharenou's empirical research in this early period covered a range of HRM topics, for example, on absenteeism, 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.
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