Associate Professor Stacey Parker

As an Associate Professor and endorsed Organisational Psychologist at UQ's School of Psychology, Stacey Parker researches, supervises, teaches, and consults on a broad range of work and organisational topics. Through her research, she aims to help organisations and their employees devise new strategies for balancing and realising the dual concerns of feeling well and performing well. To this end, she has researched employee stress, well-being, motivation, and performance in a range of high-performance settings (e.g., small business owners, professional musicians, elite athletes, and safety critical work in healthcare and transport industries). She also supplements this field research with a program of basic research using work simulation paradigms.

Some of her specific research topics include: how workers manage their energy during work; how workers recover from work stress in off-the-job time; how jobs and careers can be designed to maximise well-being, motivation, and performance; she also explores the 'hidden costs' of performance management systems. Beyond these core areas, she has also contributed to other topics through theoretical (i.e., self-determination theory) and methodological (i.e., physiology, experience sampling, work simulation) expertise in academic, industry, and student-based collaborations. For example, in areas like supervisor support, diversity and inclusion, employee voice, employee green behaviour, compassion science, and social identity.

Passionate about doing practically-relevant research, though her consulting and advisory work she has helped both public and private organisations tackle issues with selection and recruitment, training and development, career management, work design, culture change, and operational safety. She also regularly engages with the media on topics related to her expertise and her research and/or commentary has been featured in outlets like TIME Magazine, Harvard Business Review, HR Magazine, and ABC's popular podcast This Working Life. She currently serves on the Editorial Boards for the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, and the European Journal of Work and Organisational Psychology. Her achievements and contributions to the discipline and profession have been recognised by the Australian Psychological Society, with a Doctoral Thesis Award in Occupational Health Psychology (2013) and Early Career Award in Organisational Psychology (2022).