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UWA Business School Professor Sharon Parker has been awarded a Future Fellowship in the Australian Research Council's (ARC) latest round of funding.

The four-year fellowship is worth over $800,000, and will allow Professor Parker to continue her work in the area of proactive work behaviour.

It brings to three the number of fellowships held by UWA researchers in the organisational behaviour discipline, with professors Cristina Gibson (also from the Business School) and Mark Griffin (from the School of Psychology) having won fellowships in last year's round of funding.  Across the scheme, Professor Parker's and Professor Griffin's Future Fellowships are the only fellowships to have been awarded to researchers in the field of "Business and Management" in the last two rounds of Future Fellowship funding.

Professor Parker's research will focus on encouraging individuals to take charge of their situations and self-initiate positive change. In particular, it hopes to improve the quality of the health care and community service sectors by creating employees that think ahead, actively introduce better ways of doing things, and make the most of opportunities.

Professor Parker was previously the Director of the Institute of Work Psychology at Sheffield University, where she examined proactive work behaviours in a variety of settings. In particular, she investigated the effects of personality, knowledge, context, and other factors on workers in order to discover ways of encouraging proactive behaviour.

Professor Tracey Horton, Dean of the UWA Business School, said that the new fellowship would reinforce the Business School's reputation as a centre of excellence for organisational behaviour research. ‘The research being conducted by our future fellows encompasses proactive behaviour, virtual teams, effective leadership and more,' she said. ‘When you combine that with Woodside Professor of Leadership and Management David Day's research into leadership development, and the research of our early and mid career academics, you find a whole wealth of knowledge that will enable Australian workplaces to remain at the forefront of organisational behaviour practices.'

The Future Fellowships scheme offers funding to outstanding Australian and international researchers in the middle of their careers. It was introduced by the federal government in 2008 with the aim of encouraging more research to be conducted in Australia.

Media references

Heather Merritt
Director, External Relations
UWA Business School
T: +618 6488 8171
E: [email protected]

Verity Chia
Communications Officer
UWA Business School
E: [email protected]