50 Influential Thought Leaders in Organisational Psychology

Introduction

If you want to understand why people thrive at work or why they quietly disengage, the field of organisational psychology is where the best answers live. The thought leaders in organisational psychology globally are producing research and frameworks that affect how organisations are designed, how teams collaborate, how leaders make decisions, and what kinds of workplaces actually support sustained human performance. Knowing who they are is increasingly important for anyone serious about leading well.

The research underpinning this field is not abstract. When Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School established that psychological safety was the key determinant of team learning, her findings were subsequently validated by Google's Project Aristotle, which identified psychological safety as the number one factor in high-performing teams. When Arnold Bakker and Evangelia Demerouti developed the Job Demands-Resources model at Erasmus University Rotterdam, they gave organisations a practical framework for diagnosing the conditions that lead to either burnout or engagement. When Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania published her research on grit, she reframed how organisations think about perseverance, development, and potential. These contributions are not theoretical curiosities. They shape hiring practices, team design, leadership programmes, and culture strategies in organisations around the world.

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology now has more than 9,000 members globally, and the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior has earned an impact factor that places it first in applied psychology and first in management among academic journals. The field is producing more rigorous, actionable knowledge than at any point in its history, and the people generating it are more globally distributed and more publicly engaged than ever before.

This list brings together 50 voices in organisational psychology whose work is actively shaping how organisations function in 2025 and 2026. The list deliberately moves past the most prominent household names to surface researchers and practitioners who are producing genuine contributions and are actively sharing their thinking. You will find academics whose research appears in the leading journals, practitioners who are translating that research into consulting work and keynote stages, and communicators whose writing and content are helping large audiences understand what organisational psychology can actually offer.

If your organisation is wrestling with how to build team cultures where people genuinely contribute, how to reduce burnout without sacrificing performance, how to make better decisions about talent, or how to lead through uncertainty with more than instinct, this list is a starting point. For teams that want to do the specific work of building psychological safety, improving team dynamics, running Working Genius sessions, or developing leadership communication, Jonno White works with organisations around the world on those conversations.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Organisational Psychology Matters

The stakes are high. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, global employee engagement fell to 20 percent in 2025, down from a peak of 23 percent in 2022. Low engagement costs the global economy an estimated 8.9 trillion US dollars annually. Burnout rates among knowledge workers remain elevated well above pre-pandemic levels. Workplace incivility has been rising steadily for decades, with Christine Porath's research at Georgetown showing that 98 percent of professionals have experienced incivility at work and 99 percent have witnessed it. The costs are not limited to wellbeing. Porath's research demonstrates that incivility reduces performance on cognitive tasks, reduces creativity, and drives talented people out of organisations.

At the same time, the science of what actually works is more developed than most leaders realise. The JD-R model developed by Arnold Bakker and Wilmar Schaufeli gives organisations a validated framework for auditing the demands and resources in any role. The psychological safety research of Amy Edmondson has been replicated across dozens of industries and countries, giving leaders specific, testable actions rather than generic culture platitudes. The work of Sharon Parker at Curtin University on work design shows that how a job is structured determines engagement far more reliably than a single leadership intervention. Organisations that ignore this science are not just missing an opportunity. They are repeatedly making costly mistakes that the research would have prevented.

The voices on this list are the people doing the most important work in understanding and improving how humans function inside organisations. Following their thinking is one of the most efficient investments a senior leader or HR professional can make. For the team-level facilitation work that helps translate this research into actual behaviour change inside organisations, reach out to Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, at jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, they have made a substantial, documented contribution to the field of organisational psychology or closely related disciplines, evidenced by peer-reviewed research, a recognised credential, a widely adopted framework, or a published body of work that has demonstrably influenced practice. Second, they are actively engaged with the conversation in 2025 and 2026, through publishing, speaking, posting, or advising. Third, the list was deliberately built to surface voices that go beyond the most prominent household names the reader is probably already aware of. The list spans continental Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and draws from academic research, applied consultancy, neuroscience, and practitioner spaces. The field's most prolific voices are well-represented, but this list was specifically designed to include researchers and practitioners the reader may not yet have encountered.

Category One: Psychological Safety, Voice, and Team Learning

The work of psychological safety has moved from academic concept to boardroom priority over the past decade. The researchers and practitioners in this category have done the most to establish both what psychological safety is and how it can be built. Their collective contribution to understanding how people speak up, stay silent, take risks, and learn inside organisations represents some of the most cited and most practised research in the entire field.

1. Amy Edmondson

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and she holds the distinction of being ranked the number one management thinker in the world by Thinkers50 in 2021 and 2023, and number two in 2025. Her contribution to organisational psychology is centred on psychological safety, which she defines as the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. That research, first published in a 1999 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly, was the foundation on which an entire generation of team dynamics research has been built.

Edmondson's book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, published in 2018 and translated into eleven languages, brought her academic work into practical reach for leaders who would never read an academic journal. Her more recent book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, published in 2023 and winner of the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award that year, extends the psychological safety framework into a broader theory of intelligent failure and organisational learning. Google's Project Aristotle validated her research independently, finding psychological safety to be the single most important determinant of team effectiveness. For those wanting to understand how teams learn and why most teams do not, Edmondson's body of work is the clearest starting point in the entire field.

2. Connie Noonan Hadley

Connie Noonan Hadley is the Founder and Chief Scientist of the Institute for Life at Work and a Research Associate Professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, where she also serves as Associate Director of the BU Questrom Institute for Leadership and Work. She was named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024, a list of thirty management thinkers whose ideas are considered most likely to shape the field in coming years. Her research covers team dynamics, psychological safety, employee loneliness, burnout, wellbeing at work, inclusive cultures, and career decision-making.

Her work on workplace loneliness is particularly timely. Her research, published in Harvard Business Review alongside colleague Sarah Wright, demonstrates that loneliness at work is more widespread than most organisations recognise and that it substantially undermines both performance and health. In a 2025 episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, Hadley explored how AI adoption is reshaping workplace connection in ways that may deepen rather than resolve the loneliness problem if organisations are not intentional. Her ability to bridge the gap between neuroscience, team research, and the practical concerns of senior HR leaders makes her one of the most practically useful voices in the field right now.

3. Megan Reitz

Megan Reitz is the Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Ashridge Executive Education, Hult International Business School, and an Associate Fellow at Said Business School at Oxford University. She has been ranked among the top fifty management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 in 2023 and 2025, and has appeared on HR Magazine's list of Most Influential Thinkers since 2017. Her research sits at the intersection of leadership, dialogue, mindfulness, and the dynamics that make it safer or more dangerous for people to tell their leaders what they actually need to hear.

Her book Speak Up: Say What Needs to Be Said and Hear What Needs to Be Heard, co-authored with John Higgins and published by the Financial Times, was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year in 2020. The second edition, titled Speak Out, Listen Up, was published in 2024, extending the framework with new research on employee activism and the power dynamics that shape who feels entitled to speak and who stays silent. Her perspective on organisational dialogue draws on philosophy, systems thinking, and neuroscience in ways that distinguish it from the more behavioural approaches that dominate the psychological safety literature.

4. Anita Williams Woolley

Anita Williams Woolley is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Her most influential contribution to the field is the concept of collective intelligence in teams, which she established in a landmark 2010 paper in the journal Science, co-authored with Christopher F. Chabris, Nada Hashmi, Thomas W. Malone, and others. That paper introduced the finding that teams have a measurable general intelligence factor that predicts their performance across a wide range of tasks, and that this factor is determined not by the intelligence of individual members but by their social sensitivity, equality of participation, and gender composition.

The implications of that finding have shaped how organisations think about team composition, meeting facilitation, and collaboration design. More recent work from Woolley's lab has extended the collective intelligence framework into questions of human-AI collaboration, asking how the composition of teams changes when AI systems become active participants rather than passive tools. Her research is published in Science, PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Management Science, and the Academy of Management Review. For organisations designing teams or integrating AI into knowledge work, Woolley's research is among the most practically consequential work being produced in the field today.

5. Christine Porath

Christine Porath is an Associate Professor of Management at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and one of the world's leading researchers on workplace incivility. Her research, conducted across six continents and covering more than twenty years, shows that the experience of rudeness, dismissiveness, and disrespect in organisational settings damages cognitive performance, reduces creativity, diminishes wellbeing, and drives high-quality people out. Her TED Talk on the subject has been viewed nearly one million times, and her book Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace provides leaders with a research-grounded roadmap for building cultures of respect.

Porath's specific contribution is methodological as well as conceptual. She was among the first researchers to document the costs of incivility not just for the direct targets but for witnesses. Bystanders who observe rude behaviour show measurable declines in performance and are more likely to leave their organisations. This finding reframes civility from a nice-to-have aspiration into a structural component of how organisations retain and deploy their best people. Her research on thriving at work, co-developed with Gretchen Spreitzer at Michigan Ross, introduces a two-component model combining vitality and learning as the joint predictors of sustainable high performance.

6. Dolly Chugh

Dolly Chugh is the Jacob B. Melnick Term Professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, where she teaches MBA courses in leadership and management. She was named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2025 and has received NYU's Distinguished Teaching Award. Her research focuses on what she calls bounded ethicality, examining how otherwise good, well-intentioned people regularly and predictably behave in ways that fall short of their own ethical standards, not through cynicism or malice but through unconscious bias, motivated reasoning, and cognitive limitations.

Her 2018 book The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias moved this research from the academic into the applied, drawing on psychology, behavioural economics, and management research to give readers specific tools for closing the gap between the leader they intend to be and the leader they are actually being. The book was praised by Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck, and it has been widely used in leadership development programmes. Her forthcoming book The Good Boss Project will centre on the psychology of effective management. For HR professionals and leadership developers looking to understand the unconscious dynamics that undermine inclusion and equity efforts despite good intentions, Chugh's work is one of the most practically grounded resources available.

7. Raina Brands

Raina Brands is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead at UCL School of Management, a role she stepped into in October 2025 following promotion from Associate Professor, having previously been based at London Business School. She holds a PhD from Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and a Master's in Organisational Psychology from the University of Queensland. Her research integrates the dynamics of social networks and the dynamics of gender stereotyping in organisations, two areas that she has shown to be deeply intertwined.

A 2025 paper co-authored with Martin Kilduff in the Academy of Management Review, titled Multiplex Jeopardy: Dissonant Ties Promote Gender Bias in Workplace Social Networks, examines how the structure of relationships inside organisations shapes the persistence of gender bias in ways that traditional interventions fail to address. She has also founded Career Equally, an initiative dedicated to helping women and their organisations identify and counter the structural biases embedded in career development systems. Her work is covered in the New York Times, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and the Guardian, and her research on FTSE-100 board appointments demonstrates that the benefits of serving on prominent boards accrue very differently to men and women.

Category Two: The Science of Engagement, Burnout, and Recovery

The research on what drives people toward engagement and away from burnout is among the most practically useful body of knowledge in organisational psychology. The researchers in this category have produced the frameworks and instruments that organisations use to audit, diagnose, and improve the conditions of work. Their contributions to the JD-R model, to occupational health psychology, to positive organisational scholarship, and to the design of healthy work are the intellectual backbone of evidence-based people strategy globally.

8. Arnold Bakker

Arnold Bakker is a Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and his research on work engagement and burnout has been cited more than 390,000 times according to Google Scholar, making him one of the most cited researchers in the history of management science. He is one of the principal architects of the Job Demands-Resources theory, which he developed with Evangelia Demerouti. That theory proposes that employee wellbeing is determined by the balance between the demands a role places on the individual and the resources available to meet those demands, and it has become the dominant framework in occupational health psychology globally.

A decade review of the JD-R model, co-authored by Bakker, Demerouti, and Ana Isabel Sanz-Vergel and published in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior in 2023, extends the original model with four major innovations: the person-situation approach, multilevel JD-R theory, new proactive approaches, and the distinction between different types of job demands. Bakker also holds an appointment at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. For any leader trying to understand why their people are engaged or exhausted, and what structural changes would move the needle, Bakker's research is the place to start.

9. Sabine Sonnentag

Sabine Sonnentag is a Full Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Mannheim in Germany, and she was ranked among the top one percent of researchers worldwide by Clarivate's Highly Cited Researchers list. Her research addresses what may be the most practically under-appreciated question in the entire field of work psychology: how do people recover from the demands of work when they are not at work? Her concept of psychological detachment proposes that the mental switching-off from work during evenings and weekends is a critical determinant of both recovery quality and next-day performance.

Her 2023 review article in Personnel Psychology synthesises the field's state of knowledge on wellbeing far beyond the stress and burnout literature to include positive states, daily fluctuations, and the conditions that enable sustainable performance over time. Sonnentag was also a keynote speaker at the 2026 European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology Conference, where her session focused on recovery processes and their implications for organisational intervention. For any organisation designing flexible work arrangements, policies around out-of-hours contact, or wellbeing programmes, Sonnentag's research provides the most rigorous evidence base available.

10. Jari Hakanen

Jari Hakanen is a Research Professor at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, a Docent in Social Psychology at the University of Helsinki, and a Visiting Professor at Keio University in Tokyo. He is the leading figure in Scandinavian work psychology and one of the most important voices globally on positive occupational health, work engagement, and the conditions that enable people to find their jobs genuinely energising rather than merely tolerable. He received the Gold Medal of Special Merit from the Finnish government for his contributions to improving working life.

His 2026 article Work Engagement: Feeling Happy, Motivated, and Resilient at Work, co-authored with Janne Kaltiainen and published in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, provides a comprehensive review of twenty years of engagement research and identifies the conditions under which engagement is most likely to develop and sustain. Hakanen's research on the Job Demands-Resources model, job crafting, and positive gain spirals at work has been among the most influential in shaping how Scandinavian and European organisations approach wellbeing strategy. His work brings a non-US perspective on work psychology that is essential reading for anyone operating in or studying European working contexts.

11. Wilmar Schaufeli

Wilmar Schaufeli is a Full Professor at KU Leuven in Belgium and Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University. He is one of the most influential researchers in the history of occupational psychology and is best known for co-developing the concept of work engagement alongside Arnold Bakker, and for developing the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, which has been used in thousands of studies across more than fifty countries. He also co-developed the Burnout Assessment Tool, which is replacing the Maslach Burnout Inventory in many clinical and research settings globally.

A January 2026 study co-authored by Schaufeli and published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies, examining key drivers of nurse burnout and work engagement in a cross-national sample across Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and England, demonstrates that his research continues to address urgent practical questions with methodological rigour. His half-century of contributions to the science of burnout and engagement gives him a unique perspective on how the field has evolved and what the persistent gaps are.

12. Sharon K. Parker

Sharon K. Parker is an ARC Laureate Fellow and John Curtin Distinguished Professor in Organisational Behaviour at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, where she directs the Centre for Transformative Work Design within the Future of Work Institute. Her research has been cited more than 62,000 times internationally and she was recognised as one of the world's most influential scientists in the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list from Clarivate and the 2020 World's Top Two Percent Scientists list from Stanford University. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology.

Parker's primary contribution is to the science of work design, an area she has developed over three decades to demonstrate that how a job is structured, in terms of autonomy, feedback, task variety, cognitive demands, and interdependence with others, is a far more powerful determinant of employee engagement and wellbeing than most leadership interventions. Her SMART Work Design framework gives practitioners a structured evidence-based process for auditing and redesigning roles. She also contributed to the development of the Good Work Design principles now used by Safe Work Australia and Comcare to improve the quality of work across Australian organisations.

13. Gretchen Spreitzer

Gretchen Spreitzer is a Professor of Management and co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Her research on employee empowerment and the concept of thriving at work has been among the most practically influential contributions to positive organisational psychology over the past two decades. The construct of thriving, which she defines as a dual state of vitality and learning, offers organisations a more complete model of employee flourishing than either engagement or wellbeing alone.

Her paper An Integrative Multilevel Review of Thriving at Work: Assessing Progress and Promise, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2021, synthesises the research base on thriving and identifies the organisational conditions, including positive meaning, positive relationships, autonomy, and positive affect, that most reliably support employees in thriving sustainably. Spreitzer is also the Associate Dean for Corporate and Executive Relations at Michigan Ross, a role that positions her at the intersection of research and practice. Her work, alongside that of Christine Porath and Kim Cameron, represents the most developed academic foundation for organisations seeking to go beyond simply preventing burnout toward actively building conditions where people genuinely flourish.

14. Kim Cameron

Kim Cameron is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, where he co-founded the Center for Positive Organizations and helped establish the field of Positive Organizational Scholarship. His research on organisational virtuousness, particularly his work on how organisational responses to downsizing and trauma determine whether organisations emerge from adversity with enhanced or diminished performance, challenged the dominant assumption that hard times require hardened responses.

His co-edited volume Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline, co-authored with Jane Dutton and Robert Quinn in 2003, established the intellectual scaffolding for an entire generation of researchers who have studied the conditions under which individuals, teams, and organisations do their best work. Cameron's research on abundance mindset, positive deviance, and the performance effects of virtuous behaviour in organisations has demonstrated empirically that organisations that prioritise human flourishing alongside financial performance consistently outperform those that treat them as competing priorities.

15. Jane Dutton

Jane Dutton is the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, and a co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizations alongside Kim Cameron. Her research focuses on the conditions inside organisations that enable individual and collective flourishing, with particular attention to the role of high-quality connections, compassion, job crafting, and organisational identity in enabling people to contribute their best.

Her work on high-quality connections, which she defines as brief, positive interactions between people that produce feelings of positive regard, energy, and mutuality, has generated a substantial body of research demonstrating that these brief relational moments have disproportionate effects on individual performance, resilience, and wellbeing. Her extensive work on organisational compassion represents decades of effort to build a rigorous empirical foundation for understanding how organisations can care for their people rather than simply deploying them. For any leader working in a context where people have experienced loss, trauma, or sustained hardship, Dutton's research offers unusually practical and evidence-based guidance.

Category Three: Thriving, Behaviour Change, and the Motivated Mind

Organisational psychology is increasingly informed by positive psychology, behavioural science, and cognitive neuroscience. The researchers in this category are working at those intersections to understand not just what goes wrong in organisations but what goes right, and what kinds of conditions and interventions most reliably help people perform at their best over time.

16. Katy Milkman

Katy Milkman is the James G. Dinan Endowed Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative. Her research explores how insights from behavioural economics and psychology can be applied to help people follow through on their intentions, a problem she frames as the gap between what people want to do and what they actually do. She has been named one of the world's top fifty management thinkers by Thinkers50 in both 2021 and 2023.

Her 2021 book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, named by the New York Times as one of the eight best books for healthy living that year, translates her academic research into accessible guidance on the science of behaviour change. A 2026 paper co-authored with Angela Duckworth and others, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, examines how targeting behavioural interventions based on baseline motivation levels improves outcomes, with broad implications for how organisations design change programmes.

17. Ethan Kross

Ethan Kross is a Professor of Psychology and Management at the University of Michigan and director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory, which he founded. He is one of the world's leading experts on the science of self-talk, the inner voice that shapes how people process their experiences, regulate their emotions, and perform under pressure. His research sits at the intersection of social psychology, neuroscience, and organisational behaviour.

His 2021 New York Times bestseller Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It translated more than fifteen years of laboratory research into accessible tools for managing the inner monologue that either supports or undermines performance. Kross has also studied the psychological effects of social media use in the workplace, the role of self-distancing in emotional regulation under pressure, and the conditions under which distanced perspective-taking improves decision quality. For leaders concerned about the emotional substrate of performance, Kross's work is a highly practical resource.

18. Lisa Feldman Barrett

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University with additional appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she serves as Chief Scientific Officer for the Center for Law, Brain and Behaviour. She is among the top 0.1 percent most-cited scientists in the world and is a recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in neuroscience, and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association. She published a paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2026, continuing to advance her theory of constructed emotion.

Her 2017 book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain presented a fundamental challenge to the conventional view that emotions are hardwired and universal biological responses. Instead, Barrett argues from an extensive body of neuroscience and psychological research that emotions are constructed predictions, built by the brain from past experience, physiological interoception, and social context. The implications for organisational psychology are significant: if emotions are constructed rather than received, organisations can actively shape the emotional cultures that determine how people interpret interpersonal events, manage stress, and make decisions.

Category Four: Talent, Identity, and the Science of Self-Knowledge

Understanding who people are, how they see themselves, and how they are seen by others is central to talent management, leadership development, and inclusion strategy. The researchers and practitioners in this category are producing some of the most rigorous and practically consequential work on identity, self-awareness, personality assessment, and the psychology of belonging at work.

19. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup, the director of UCL's Industrial-Organisational and Business Psychology programme, and a Professor of Business Psychology at both University College London and Columbia University. He has published more than ten books and over 150 scientific papers on the psychology of talent, leadership, personality, and AI. Thinkers50 recognised him with a Digital Thinking Award in 2023 and a Talent Award in 2017.

His 2019 book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? And How to Fix It, published by Harvard Business Review Press, brought together decades of psychometric research to make a rigorous empirical case that organisations systematically misidentify the qualities that predict leadership effectiveness, favouring confidence and charisma over competence and integrity. His 2025 book Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated, also from HBR Press, extends this critique into questions of self-presentation and identity in professional settings. His combination of serious academic output and accessible public writing makes him one of the most useful voices for HR professionals and talent leaders who want to ground their practice in rigorous psychological science.

20. Tasha Eurich

Tasha Eurich is the Principal of The Eurich Group, a boutique consultancy that helps executives transform when the stakes are high, and holds a PhD in Industrial-Organisational Psychology from Colorado State University. She has been named the number one self-awareness coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith and has worked directly with tens of thousands of leaders across organisations including Google, Salesforce, the NBA, Walmart, and the White House Leadership Development Program.

Her New York Times bestseller Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think drew on three years of original research to examine the gap between how people perceive themselves and how they are actually experienced. Her most recent book Shatterproof, presented in a 2025 session at the University of Dayton, outlines a framework for using adversity as a catalyst for growth rather than simply surviving it. For senior leaders and executive coaches working on the specific question of how leaders develop accurate, useful self-knowledge, Eurich's research is the most practically grounded body of work available.

21. Angela Duckworth

Angela Duckworth is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, faculty co-director of the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative, and co-founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing scientific insights that help young people thrive. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 for her work on grit and self-control, and her 2016 book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance was an instant New York Times number one bestseller.

The concept of grit, which Duckworth defines as the combination of passion and perseverance for a long-term goal, has had a profound effect on how organisations think about talent development, hiring, and the conditions that support sustained effort. Her research challenged the conventional over-reliance on IQ and natural talent as predictors of performance, showing empirically that sustained effort over time distinguishes high achievers from their peers even when controlling for raw cognitive ability. A 2026 paper she co-authored with Katy Milkman and others, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, extends the practical application of her research into organisational settings.

22. Ludmila Praslova

Ludmila Praslova is a Professor of Industrial-Organisational Psychology and the founding Director of Graduate Programs in I-O Psychology at Vanguard University of Southern California. She received the Thinkers50 Talent Award in 2025 and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024. Her research focuses on neurodiversity, intersectional inclusion, organisational culture, and the prevention of moral injury in the workplace. She is the author of The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work, published by Berrett-Koehler in 2024.

The Canary Code introduces a framework organised around six practical principles for organisations that want to go beyond compliance-based diversity efforts toward genuinely creating conditions where neurodivergent, disabled, and marginalised employees can contribute fully. She writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Psychology Today, and posts actively on LinkedIn. She has provided neuroinclusion training to organisations including Amazon, Bank of America, and MIT. For any organisation committed to the intersection of psychological safety and inclusion, Praslova's work is essential.

23. Janice Gassam Asare

Janice Gassam Asare is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Teachers College and the founder of BWG Business Solutions, an award-winning DEI consultancy. She holds a doctorate in Applied Organisational Psychology and was named LinkedIn's number one Top Voice in Equity. She is the author of three bestselling books including Dirty Diversity, The Pink Elephant, and Decentering Whiteness in the Workplace, and her 2026 book Rise and Resist: How to Reclaim Workplace Equity and Justice addresses the rollback of diversity commitments with a research-grounded practical framework.

Her doctoral research examined how skin colour and religious headgear on LinkedIn profiles affected application outcomes, producing findings that continue to inform how organisations design their recruitment processes. She has collaborated with organisations including Google, Amazon, PBS, Yale University, and H and M. She is a 2x TEDx speaker and the host of The Dirty Diversity Podcast. For HR professionals and leaders trying to understand the organisational psychology of equity and the specific interventions that produce durable change, Gassam Asare's research and practitioner experience represent one of the most rigorous and current resources available.

24. Modupe Akinola

Modupe Akinola is the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Faculty Director of the Sanford C. Bernstein and Company Center for Leadership and Ethics. In 2018 she became the first Black professor in Columbia Business School's history to earn tenure. She holds a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from Harvard University where she received the Wyss Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research. Her research uses a multi-method approach including physiological measures to examine how stress shapes decision-making, creativity, and the success of employees from underrepresented groups.

Her 2025 paper published in the Academy of Management Journal, co-authored with Michael Slepian and Katherine Qianwen Sun and titled The Look of a Leader, examines the physical appearance cues that organisations use to make leadership judgements, with implications for who gets identified as leadership material and who does not. She is one of the most highly rated professors at Columbia Business School and is a regular contributor to discussions on the intersection of stress, performance, and identity, with LinkedIn posts from early 2026 showing active engagement with AI, leadership development, and the future of work.

25. Dieter Veldsman

Dieter Veldsman is the Chief HR Scientist at AIHR, the global online HR academy, and a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg in HR and Organisational Behaviour. He brings more than eighteen years of experience as a senior HR practitioner, including roles as Group CHRO and People Effectiveness Executive, to his current work synthesising research for a global HR practitioner audience. He was named Chief HR Officer of the Year by the CHRO SA Society in 2021 and Practitioner of the Year by the South African Board for People Practices in 2018.

His book Work for Humans: Building Sustainable Employee Experience Strategies, co-authored with Marna van der Merwe, applies organisational psychology research to the practical challenge of designing employee experience strategies that are scientifically grounded and practically executable. He hosts the HR Dialogues videocast, has presented at more than one hundred conferences globally, and has authored twenty-five academic chapters. His upcoming TEDx talk at TEDx Graham Windham in 2026 centres on self-awareness in leadership. For the global HR community and particularly for practitioners in Africa and emerging markets, Veldsman provides a perspective grounded in genuine cross-continental experience and scientific rigour.

26. Rob Briner

Rob Briner is a Professor of Organisational Psychology at the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London and the Scientific Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management. He topped HR Magazine's Most Influential Thinkers list in 2016 and has remained in the top five consistently since. He received the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology Academic Contribution to Practice Award in 2014.

Briner's primary contribution to the field is methodological and critical rather than purely empirical. His central concern is the quality of evidence that HR and management practitioners rely on, and he has spent decades pushing back against the adoption of HR practices that are popular, well-marketed, and unsupported by rigorous scientific evidence. His columns for HR Magazine examining the evidence for practices including talent management, employee engagement, NLP, absence management, and performance reviews have become some of the most-read commentary in professional HR. For any HR professional who wants to evaluate whether a new initiative is actually supported by good evidence, Briner's thinking provides the clearest critical framework available.

Category Five: Neuroleadership and Behavioural Neuroscience

The connection between neuroscience and organisational psychology has produced some of the most compelling recent contributions to the field. The researchers and communicators in this category work at the boundary of cognitive and affective neuroscience and the practical world of leadership, communication, and culture. Their work is reshaping how organisations understand motivation, emotion, decision-making, and what leaders can do with an understanding of how the brain functions under the social conditions of work.

27. David Rock

David Rock is the Co-Founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, a cognitive science consultancy that operates in twenty-four countries and has worked with over fifty percent of the Fortune 100. He coined the term neuroleadership in 2006 and co-founded the NeuroLeadership Summit, which brings brain scientists and business practitioners together to translate neuroscience into leadership practice. He is the author of four books including Your Brain at Work, a business bestseller that presented the neuroscience of attention, performance, and decision-making for executives.

His most influential research contribution is the SCARF model, a framework built from social neuroscience research that identifies five social domains, Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness, which the brain monitors automatically for threat and reward. The model provides leaders and HR professionals with a practical lens for understanding why certain management behaviours reliably disengage people and why others reliably motivate. The Institute's research on growth mindset in organisations and on fairness in performance management processes positions it at the intersection of scientific credibility and large-scale practical impact.

28. Liz Fosslien

Liz Fosslien is the Head of Brand Narrative and Content at Atlassian and the co-author, with Mollie West Duffy, of two Wall Street Journal bestselling books: No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, published in 2019 and translated into more than fifteen languages, and Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, published in 2022. She combines an analytical background in economics with a distinctive visual approach to communicating research on emotions, behaviour, and culture in ways that organisations and individuals can immediately apply.

No Hard Feelings drew on research from behavioural economics, psychology, and organisational behaviour to challenge the cultural norm that emotions do not belong at work. The book provides a practical guide to the conditions under which emotional expression is productive, including building psychological safety in teams, communicating across emotional styles, and leading cultures where emotion is an asset rather than a problem to be managed. For any leader dealing with the emotional dimensions of a difficult team dynamic, a cultural change, or a period of uncertainty, Fosslien and Duffy's books translate serious research into some of the most accessible and practical guidance available.

29. Mollie West Duffy

Mollie West Duffy is an organisational designer and the co-author, with Liz Fosslien, of No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings. Her work as an organisational designer draws on industrial and organisational psychology to help teams and organisations function more effectively, and she has practised this work across a range of organisational contexts including design consultancy and direct client engagements. Her ongoing LinkedIn engagement and speaking history confirm active participation in the field through 2025 and 2026.

Her contribution to the field is in the translation of emotions research into the practical domain of organisational design, an area often dominated by structural and process thinking to the exclusion of psychological reality. The argument she and Fosslien develop across their two books is that organisations which design around an idealised emotionless employee consistently underperform compared with those that acknowledge and work with the reality of human emotional life. For those new to the practical intersection of emotional science and organisational design, Duffy's work provides one of the most accessible entry points.

30. John Amaechi

John Amaechi is a Professor of Leadership at the University of Exeter Business School and the Founder of APS Intelligence Ltd, a consultancy he established in 2006 that works with FTSE 100 boards and global enterprises across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas. He holds the OBE for services to sport and the voluntary sector, and he is a Chartered Psychologist and Chartered Fellow of the CIPD. In 2026 he was appointed to the Mayor of London's AI and Jobs Taskforce, advising on workforce capability, role design, and the behavioural conditions required for effective AI adoption at scale.

His 2025 book It's Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders identifies the mindsets and behavioural disciplines that determine leadership effectiveness, developed from decades of advising organisations at the highest levels. His earlier book The Promises of Giants, a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, won the Porchlight Award for best business book. Amaechi has been a LinkedIn Top Voice since 2020 and posts regularly on inclusive leadership, organisational psychology, and the specific behavioural changes that leaders need to make to build genuinely ethical and high-performing cultures.

Category Six: Inclusion, Equity, and the Psychology of Belonging

The psychology of who thrives in organisations, and under what conditions, is one of the most active and consequential areas of research in the field. The researchers and practitioners in this category are examining how identity, belonging, fairness, and the structural conditions of organisational life determine who reaches their potential and who does not. Their work speaks directly to the most pressing people challenges facing organisations in 2025 and 2026.

31. Martin Seligman

Martin Seligman is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Penn Positive Psychology Center. He is widely credited as one of the founding architects of the positive psychology movement, using his 1998 presidential address to the American Psychological Association to call for psychology to turn its attention to the study of what makes life worth living, human flourishing, and the conditions under which individuals and organisations perform at their best.

His PERMA model, which identifies Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement as the five building blocks of wellbeing and flourishing, has been widely adopted in organisational wellbeing and employee experience strategy. His research on learned optimism has produced some of the most durable and practically useful insights in the entire field. The PERMA model continues to inform how HR professionals and organisational consultants assess and design for wellbeing, and Seligman's influence on the field of organisational psychology is pervasive even among researchers and practitioners who do not cite him directly.

32. Shawn Achor

Shawn Achor is the founder and CEO of GoodThink, a research and consulting firm, and a former teaching fellow at Harvard University where he spent more than a decade studying positive psychology. His TED Talk on positive psychology and happiness is one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. He is the author of several books including The Happiness Advantage and Big Potential, which apply positive psychology research specifically to the context of organisational performance.

His central research contribution is the finding that positive affect precedes performance rather than following from it, reversing the conventional assumption that people feel good because they perform well. His work shows that when organisations improve the conditions that produce positive emotions and meaning, performance improvements follow. This has practical implications for how organisations sequence their culture change and wellbeing interventions: investing in the conditions for positive emotion before performance pressure rather than after. His accessible communication style and willingness to translate complex research into immediate practical application has made him one of the most widely read voices in applied positive organisational psychology.

33. Carol Dweck

Carol Dweck is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and one of the most widely cited researchers in the history of psychology. Her concept of the growth mindset, introduced in a 2006 book and refined through decades of laboratory and field research, proposes that people who believe their abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work perform better and respond more adaptively to challenge than those who believe their abilities are fixed. Her TED Talk on the growth versus fixed mindset has more than twenty million views.

The organisational implications of Dweck's research are significant and have driven an enormous amount of management development and culture change work over the past two decades. The NeuroLeadership Institute has built a substantial practice around the organisational implementation of growth mindset at scale. A critical body of research has also examined the conditions under which growth mindset interventions succeed in organisations versus when they do not, and the risk of mindset language being used to place the burden of adaptation on employees rather than on the organisation. Dweck has engaged with this criticism constructively in more recent work. Her contribution to how organisations think about talent development and learning cultures remains fundamental.

34. Nicholas Bloom

Nicholas Bloom is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and one of the world's leading researchers on remote work, management practices, and organisational productivity. He co-founded the World Management Survey, which has collected data on management practices in more than twelve thousand firms across thirty-five countries. He has been one of the most influential voices in the global debate about hybrid and remote work, providing large-scale field experimental evidence rather than anecdote or ideology.

His research on remote work, including a 2022 field experiment at a Chinese call centre published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that remote workers were thirteen percent more productive than their office-based colleagues, took fewer breaks and sick days, and reported higher job satisfaction. His follow-up research on hybrid work models has provided some of the most rigorous data available on the trade-offs involved in different working arrangements. Bloom posts actively on LinkedIn with data-driven commentary on the evolving state of remote and hybrid work, making him one of the most practically useful academic voices for organisations navigating decisions about where and how their people work.

35. Hayden Fricke

Hayden Fricke is the Global Managing Director of Steople, a Melbourne-based organisational development consultancy, and a qualified organisational psychologist with a background that includes professional tennis before his career in applied psychology. He is the author of a book on wellbeing, leadership, and performance that draws on his work across major Australian brands and his own personal experience of extreme professional pressure and mental health challenges.

His work at Steople covers leadership development, workplace culture, and behavioural change for some of Australia's largest organisations. What distinguishes Fricke from many organisational psychology practitioners is his willingness to speak publicly about the personal experience of mental health challenges in leadership contexts, modelling the kind of selective vulnerability that the research shows is associated with psychological safety. His keynote presentations are grounded in scientific research and designed to produce specific behaviour change outcomes. For organisations in Australia seeking a practitioner with both academic grounding and genuine credibility from real-world application, Fricke is one of the most respected voices in the market.

36. Leanne Faraday-Brash

Leanne Faraday-Brash is the Principal Consultant of Brash Consulting, a Sydney-based organisational psychology consultancy, and co-founder of the Workplace Justice Consortium. She has spent more than twenty-eight years working with senior leaders and executives across Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, advising on the intersection of leadership psychology, organisational justice, and workplace culture. She is known for giving frank, direct counsel to executive clients at levels that their internal teams often cannot.

Her specialisation in the psychological dynamics of leadership, workplace culture, and organisational justice makes her one of Australia's most distinctive voices in applied organisational psychology. Her consulting work focuses on helping leaders understand the gap between their intentions and their actual impact, a challenge that sits at the heart of Tasha Eurich's self-awareness research and Dolly Chugh's bounded ethicality work. Brash Consulting's focus on workplace justice brings a legal and ethical lens to the psychological analysis of organisations that distinguishes it from more conventional leadership development practice.

Category Seven: Emerging Voices and the Global Frontier

The field of organisational psychology is increasingly global, and the researchers and practitioners building its next chapter include a set of voices from contexts that have historically been underrepresented in the literature. The people in this category are doing important work that will shape how the field develops, and following them now means access to thinking that will become mainstream in the coming years.

37. Marna van der Merwe

Marna van der Merwe is the Lead Subject Matter Expert at AIHR and a registered Organisational Psychologist with the Health Professions Council of South Africa. She co-authored Work for Humans: Building Sustainable Employee Experience Strategies with Dieter Veldsman and is a regular contributor to AIHR's research publications and conference programming. She brings a deep grounding in organisational psychology research alongside extensive practical experience across the African and international HR context.

Her research at AIHR focuses on the future of work, HR impact, strategic talent management, employee experience, and the development of HR capabilities in an AI-accelerated environment. A 2026 presentation at the 31st International Congress of Applied Psychology, alongside Veldsman, addresses the most urgent practical questions facing HR practitioners globally. For a field that often produces research in the Global North and applies it in the Global South without accounting for contextual differences, Van der Merwe's dual grounding in South African and international practice is an important corrective perspective.

38. Ilona Boniwell

Ilona Boniwell is a Professor of Positive Psychology at HEC Paris and the founder of the European Network of Positive Psychology. She has spent more than two decades building the academic infrastructure of positive psychology in Europe, founding the European Association of Positive Psychology and developing the science of time use and wellbeing. She posts actively on LinkedIn about evidence-based positive psychology applications in leadership and organisational settings.

Her research covers time perspective, positive education, meaning-making, and the application of positive psychology to coaching, leadership development, and organisational culture. Her work brings a European perspective to positive psychology that is informed by a more collectivist and socially embedded understanding of wellbeing than much of the US-dominated literature. For anyone looking for a European voice in the positive psychology space who combines academic rigour with strong practitioner networks, Boniwell is one of the most connected and active voices in the field.

39. Laura Huang

Laura Huang is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage, published in 2020. Her research focuses on how impressions are formed in high-stakes evaluative contexts, how people leverage their idiosyncratic disadvantages into competitive advantages, and the psychology of how individuals from underrepresented groups navigate systemic bias in organisations. She was named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2021.

The central argument of Edge is that people who are disadvantaged in conventional evaluative systems have more options than they are typically told: rather than smoothing out their differences to conform to dominant expectations, they can learn to leverage those differences as sources of distinctive value. Her research on entrepreneurial evaluation, investor decision-making, and early-stage assessment of human potential sits at the intersection of organisational psychology, behavioural economics, and entrepreneurship research. For organisations trying to make better decisions about talent across the full diversity of their people, Huang's work offers one of the most psychologically informed frameworks.

40. Kathleen Sutcliffe

Kathleen Sutcliffe is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is one of the world's leading researchers on organisational resilience, high-reliability organisations, and the psychology of how individuals and organisations manage unexpected events without catastrophic failure. Her research draws on the study of organisations that operate in high-hazard conditions, including aircraft carrier flight operations, nuclear power plants, wildland firefighting, and intensive care units.

Her book Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, co-authored with Karl Weick, introduced the concept of the high-reliability organisation to a management audience and established the empirical foundations for understanding how attention to weak signals, distributed decision-making, and a commitment to resilience over efficiency determine whether organisations adapt well or fail badly when things go wrong. For any leader operating in a complex or high-stakes environment, Sutcliffe's research provides some of the most rigorously grounded guidance available on the psychological and organisational conditions required for reliable performance under uncertainty.

41. Jennifer Chatman

Jennifer Chatman is the Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professor of Management at the University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She is one of the leading researchers on organisational culture and its relationship to performance, and she developed the Organisational Culture Profile, a survey instrument used in thousands of research studies and applied consultancy engagements to measure and compare organisational cultures systematically. Her research demonstrates that organisational culture is a measurable, manageable variable that predicts specific performance outcomes.

Her work with Charles O'Reilly at Stanford on cultural fit, hiring for values alignment, and the performance effects of strong versus adaptive cultures has been among the most cited in the management literature on culture change. Her more recent research examines how culture change can be accelerated through the strategic deployment of narratives and symbolic action, and how leaders at different levels of organisations differently shape and transmit cultural norms. For any senior HR professional or consultant tasked with understanding or changing an organisation's culture, Chatman's combination of measurement rigour and practical applicability makes her research among the most useful in the field.

42. Nancy Rothbard

Nancy Rothbard is the David Pottruck Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a recognised expert on work engagement, identity, and the psychological dynamics of work-life integration. Her research examines how people manage the boundary between their work and non-work identities, what happens when those boundaries are violated, and how the psychological conditions of engagement at work relate to the broader conditions of human flourishing.

Her research on the psychological costs of emotional labour, on how people integrate or segment their work and personal identities, and on the implications of remote and hybrid work for engagement and wellbeing has positioned her as one of the most practically relevant voices on the blurring of work and life that is characteristic of contemporary knowledge work. She has advised organisations on the design of flexible work policies, the management of emotional demands, and the psychological conditions that enable sustained engagement across different work arrangements.

43. Alice Driscoll

Alice Driscoll was named to the Thinkers50 Radar 2026, the class of thirty emerging management thinkers whose ideas are considered most likely to shape the field. She is the co-author, with Louise van Haarst, of Smart Conflict, published in 2026, which examines how leaders can navigate conflict more effectively by understanding the psychological dynamics that make conflict either destructive or productive. Her work sits at the intersection of conflict psychology, leadership development, and organisational psychology.

Smart Conflict draws on research from social and organisational psychology to reframe conflict not as an inherently threatening experience to be avoided but as a set of conditions that, when managed with psychological skill, produce better decisions, stronger relationships, and more resilient teams. The book identifies specific psychological mechanisms that determine whether conflict escalates toward dysfunction or produces the productive tension that drives innovation. For leaders and HR practitioners dealing with teams where conflict is either suppressed or destructive, Driscoll and van Haarst's framework offers one of the most practically accessible current resources grounded in psychological research.

44. Louise van Haarst

Louise van Haarst is the co-author of Smart Conflict alongside Alice Driscoll and was also named to the Thinkers50 Radar 2026. Her work focuses on the interpersonal and group psychology of conflict, dialogue, and leadership effectiveness. She brings a background in clinical and organisational psychology to questions about how leaders and teams can move from conflict that damages relationships and performance toward conflict that strengthens them.

Van Haarst's contribution alongside Driscoll represents one of the most timely entries into a conversation that organisational psychology has historically either avoided or reduced to negotiation tactics. The psychological depth of their framework, which examines the emotional, cognitive, and relational dimensions of how conflict unfolds, distinguishes Smart Conflict from the large body of conflict management literature that treats the problem as primarily one of communication technique. For any leader who has experienced a team dynamic that is either too conflict-averse to make good decisions or too contentious to maintain trust, their work provides a research-grounded framework for understanding and changing those dynamics.

45. Kim Scott

Kim Scott is a former engineering director at Google and Apple, the author of Radical Candor: How to Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, published in 2017 and revised in 2019, and the co-founder of Radical Candor LLC. Her Radical Candor framework, which describes the combination of caring personally for individuals and challenging them directly, has become one of the most widely adopted managerial frameworks of the past decade and is used in management development programmes across hundreds of organisations globally.

Her contribution to organisational psychology is more applied than academic, but the framework she articulates sits on a substantial body of research from feedback psychology, motivation theory, and the dynamics of effective developmental relationships. Her work on the specific behaviours that make managers either effective developers of their people or drivers of disengagement has resonated deeply with organisations struggling to translate good intentions into specific behavioural practices. For any organisation designing a management development programme or trying to improve the quality of feedback conversations, Scott's work is one of the most practically grounded and most widely used frameworks available.

46. Timothy R. Clark

Timothy R. Clark is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a leadership development firm, and the author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, published in 2020. His framework breaks psychological safety into four sequential stages: inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety, and challenger safety. This sequential model has been widely adopted in organisations seeking to build psychological safety in a more structured, developmental way.

Clark's contribution to the field is in the operationalisation of Amy Edmondson's foundational research into a practical development model. His work has been influential in translating academic research on psychological safety into accessible frameworks that HR practitioners and leaders without a psychology background can understand and implement. He posts regularly on LinkedIn about leadership and psychological safety, and his consulting work applies the four-stage model across corporate, educational, and government contexts. For any leader or HR practitioner trying to build psychological safety in a systematic and measurable way, Clark's four-stage model provides one of the most accessible and operationally useful frameworks currently available.

47. Karin Tenelius

Karin Tenelius is a Swedish organisational psychologist and the co-founder of Tuff Leadership Training, a Scandinavian training and consulting firm dedicated to helping organisations adopt self-leadership and non-hierarchical management practices. She is the co-author of Moose Heads on the Table: Stories About Self-Managing Organizations from Sweden, which documents case studies of Swedish organisations that have significantly reduced management layers while improving both performance and employee wellbeing.

Tenelius's contribution to the field is rooted in a Scandinavian context where organisational democracy and flat structures have a longer history than in Anglo-American management practice. Her training programmes are grounded in research on autonomy, intrinsic motivation, and the psychological conditions required for self-direction. She posts on LinkedIn in both Swedish and English and has been a speaker at international conferences on the future of work and organisation design. For any organisation exploring the psychology of self-management, reduced hierarchy, or the transfer of decision-making authority to frontline teams, Tenelius brings one of the most practically grounded perspectives available.

48. Alison Wood Brooks

Alison Wood Brooks is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and one of the most prominent researchers on the psychology of conversation in organisational settings. Her research examines how the structure, content, and dynamics of conversations determine whether they produce positive outcomes, including better decisions, stronger relationships, more effective negotiations, and genuine mutual understanding. Her TED Talk on reappraising anxiety as excitement has been widely circulated in performance and leadership development contexts.

Her book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, published in 2024, draws on more than a decade of research to offer a framework for how people can have better conversations at work and in life. The research underpinning the book examines how people signal interest and curiosity through questions, how turn-taking dynamics determine who feels heard and who does not, and what the psychological barriers to candid and useful conversation actually are. For any organisation or leader trying to improve the quality of its most important conversations, Brooks's research provides some of the most practically useful and methodologically rigorous guidance available in the field.

49. Michael Leiter

Michael Leiter is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and holds an ongoing appointment at KU Leuven in Belgium. He is one of the world's most important researchers on burnout, best known for his decades of collaboration with Christina Maslach at Berkeley, with whom he co-developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory and co-authored several influential books including The Truth About Burnout. His research has shifted the field's understanding of burnout from an individual pathology to an organisational problem caused by specific mismatches between the demands of work and the conditions the organisation provides.

His co-authored research with Maslach identifies six areas of mismatch between the individual and the work environment that most reliably predict burnout: workload, control, reward, fairness, community, and values. This framework has been foundational to how organisations approach burnout prevention at a structural level rather than treating it as a problem of individual resilience. More recent work from Leiter's research includes the development and validation of the Burnout Assessment Tool in multiple countries. For any organisation taking a serious, evidence-based approach to burnout prevention, Leiter's research alongside Maslach and Schaufeli provides the scientific foundation.

50. Jacqueline Brassey

Jacqueline Brassey is a Principal Researcher at McKinsey Health Institute and a lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she teaches courses on organisational psychology and positive leadership. Her research focuses on the intersection of leadership, mindfulness, resilience, and mental health in organisations, and she is a lead author of the McKinsey Health Institute's research on the conditions that support or undermine mental health at work globally. She has been one of the most prolific voices translating the organisational psychology evidence base into accessible guidance for senior leaders through McKinsey's public research outputs.

Her research on the relationship between positive leadership behaviours and employee mental health outcomes addresses the specific leadership behaviours and organisational conditions that most reliably protect mental health at scale. Her 2022 report Addressing Employee Burnout: Are You Solving the Right Problem, and subsequent research on toxic workplace behaviour and its differential effects across employee groups, provides one of the most practically actionable summaries of the field's state of knowledge for the executive audience. For any HR leader or senior executive wanting to understand what the best available evidence says about the relationship between leadership practice and mental health outcomes, Brassey's research outputs are among the most clearly written and most practically oriented available.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

This list deliberately moved past some of the most prominent names in the broader space of leadership and organisational behaviour. Adam Grant, Brene Brown, and Simon Sinek would appear on most lists like this, and their work has shaped how millions of people think about motivation, leadership, and human potential. They were excluded by editorial choice rather than because their contributions are irrelevant. The goal was to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered. Christina Maslach at Berkeley, whose original burnout research with Michael Leiter predates and underpins much of what appears in this list, deserves special mention as one of the field's most important foundational voices, as does Edgar Schein, whose work on organisational culture and process consultation established the conceptual vocabulary that much of the field still uses today.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

One of the most persistent mistakes organisations make in engaging with organisational psychology is treating it as a collection of individual tips rather than a coherent science. Reading one book about grit or one article about psychological safety and applying it in isolation from the broader evidence base produces results that are at best modest and at worst counterproductive. Duckworth's research on grit works alongside, not instead of, the structural work on job design that Sharon Parker has documented at Curtin. Psychological safety does not substitute for workload management. The research is a system, not a menu.

A second common mistake is confusing the popularisation of research with the research itself. Many of the ideas that circulate most widely in leadership development circles are simplified, stretched, or misapplied versions of more nuanced findings. Rob Briner's evidence-based management work is particularly valuable for leaders trying to evaluate which practices are well-supported by rigorous research and which are being sold primarily on the basis of enthusiasm.

Third, organisations frequently underinvest in measurement. The researchers on this list, particularly Bakker, Schaufeli, Parker, and Briner, have produced validated instruments for assessing engagement, burnout, work design quality, and psychological safety that are freely available or inexpensively licensed. Using these instruments to establish a baseline and track change over time is the difference between an evidence-based people strategy and a series of hopeful initiatives. For the facilitation work that helps translate these insights into real conversations inside real teams, reach out to Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and leadership consultant, at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Fourth, the field's insights on inclusion are frequently applied to recruitment alone. Modupe Akinola, Janice Gassam Asare, Raina Brands, and Ludmila Praslova's research all demonstrate that the conditions which determine whether diverse talent thrives or leaves are structural, systemic, and persistent long after the hiring decision. Treating inclusion as a pipeline problem when it is actually a conditions problem produces the familiar pattern of organisations that recruit diversely and retain poorly.

Finally, many organisations try to implement psychological safety as a communication training programme and then wonder why it does not change the actual dynamic of their teams. The research of Edmondson, Reitz, and Clark consistently shows that psychological safety is not primarily a communication skill. It is a structural property of teams that emerges from leader behaviour, team norms, and the consequences that people experience when they speak up or make mistakes. Building it requires changing what leaders actually do, not only what they say they believe.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Reading and Following List

The most effective way to engage with the thought leaders on this list is to build a small portfolio of people whose specific focus matches the most pressing challenges your organisation is facing right now. Rather than following all fifty, which produces an overwhelming information volume, choose five to eight whose work directly addresses your current priorities.

For teams working on psychological safety and speaking up, start with Amy Edmondson, Megan Reitz, and Timothy Clark. Edmondson's The Fearless Organization gives you the conceptual foundation. Reitz's Speak Out, Listen Up gives you the political intelligence. Clark's The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety gives you the implementation structure.

For organisations wrestling with burnout and sustainable performance, the trio of Bakker, Sonnentag, and Hakanen provides the research foundation, and Sharon Parker's SMART Work Design framework gives you the structural intervention approach. Michael Leiter's work alongside Maslach and Schaufeli provides the diagnostic vocabulary.

For talent management, leadership development, and the psychology of how people see themselves and are seen, Tasha Eurich's self-awareness research, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic's talent science, and Dolly Chugh's bounded ethicality work together form a powerful evidence base that challenges most of the conventional assumptions behind competency frameworks, assessment centres, and leadership development programmes.

For inclusion, equity, and the psychology of belonging, Ludmila Praslova's Canary Code, Janice Gassam Asare's Rise and Resist, Raina Brands's network and gender research, and Modupe Akinola's stress and diversity work provide the most rigorous current reading available.

For the team-level facilitation, coaching, and leadership development work that translates this research into actual behaviour change inside your organisation, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, works with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world to help teams have the specific conversations that matter. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect, and whether in person or virtually, the work of building team cultures informed by this research is available to organisations anywhere in the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between organisational psychology and industrial psychology?

The terms are often used interchangeably. Industrial-organisational (I-O) psychology is the formal academic name for the discipline in many countries, particularly in the United States, while organisational psychology, work psychology, or occupational psychology are more common in the UK, Australia, and continental Europe. In practice, the industrial side historically focused on personnel selection, job analysis, and performance assessment, while the organisational side focused on motivation, leadership, and culture. Contemporary research largely treats these as a unified field.

How was this list compiled?

Every person on this list was selected based on their documented contribution to the field of organisational psychology, their active engagement with the conversation in 2025 and 2026, and their capacity to offer the reader genuine discovery value rather than simply confirming who is already famous. The list spans research and practice, academic and applied contexts, and multiple geographies. It deliberately moved past the most prominent household names to surface voices whose thinking represents where the field is heading rather than where it has been.

Can I hire someone to facilitate organisational psychology-related workshops or sessions for my team?

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and leadership consultant who works with leadership teams around the world to build team cultures informed by the best available organisational psychology research. He delivers Working Genius sessions, DISC workshops, StrengthsFinder facilitation, leadership keynotes, and executive team offsites for schools, corporates, and nonprofits in Australia, the UK, the USA, and internationally. Many organisations find that international travel is far more affordable than they expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team's specific needs.

What is psychological safety and why does it matter?

Psychological safety, a term coined and extensively researched by Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School, refers to the belief that a team environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Team members in psychologically safe environments feel comfortable speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, and mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation. Google's Project Aristotle found psychological safety to be the single most important determinant of team effectiveness across all the teams in its study. Teams that score high on psychological safety are more likely to learn from errors, more likely to innovate, and more likely to retain talented people.

What is the JD-R model and how do organisations use it?

The Job Demands-Resources model, developed by Arnold Bakker and Evangelia Demerouti at Erasmus University Rotterdam, proposes that employee wellbeing is shaped by the interplay between the demands a job places on the individual and the resources available to meet those demands. Demands include workload, time pressure, emotional demands, and role conflict. Resources include autonomy, feedback, social support, skill use, and development opportunities. When demands exceed resources, burnout is the likely outcome. When resources are high, engagement is the likely outcome. Organisations use the model as a diagnostic tool, surveying the demands and resources in different roles and teams to identify where structural changes would most improve wellbeing and performance.

What is the SCARF model?

The SCARF model was developed by David Rock at the NeuroLeadership Institute and is built on social neuroscience research suggesting that the brain continuously monitors five social domains for threat or reward: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. When any of these domains is perceived as threatened, the brain activates a defensive response that reduces cognitive performance and increases reactive behaviour. When they are rewarded, the brain activates an approach response that supports creative thinking, collaboration, and performance. Organisations use the SCARF model to audit leadership behaviours and organisational processes for the ways they activate threat responses unnecessarily, and to redesign them for more consistent reward responses.

Final Thoughts

The field of organisational psychology has never been more practically useful. The gap between what the research knows and what most organisations do remains vast, and that gap represents both a problem and an opportunity. The thought leaders on this list are producing the knowledge that narrows that gap. Following them, reading their work, and translating their insights into the specific conditions of your own organisation is one of the most high-leverage investments any leader or HR professional can make.

The work of building organisations where people genuinely thrive and perform at their best is not a soft aspiration. It is a research-grounded discipline with a substantial evidence base, validated instruments, tested frameworks, and decades of field research across industries and countries. The people on this list have built that evidence base and continue to extend it.

For teams that are ready to translate this knowledge into specific conversations, specific team interventions, and specific leadership behaviours, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and trusted leadership consultant, works with organisations around the world on exactly this work. For keynote speaking, Working Genius facilitation, executive team offsites, or leadership workshops, email jonno@consultclarity.org. Whether virtual or in person, international travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect.

For more on the team culture foundations that help leaders apply these insights in practice, check out my blog post 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Team Culture at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/35-essential-thought-leaders-on-team-culture.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Team Culture (2026)

The voices leading the conversation on team culture often overlap with those in organisational psychology, but the focus shifts from the scientific study of how organisations function to the applied question of how specific team cultures are built, maintained, and changed. The people on this list include practitioners who are working directly with teams on the ground, researchers who study what makes team cultures thrive or collapse, and thinkers who bridge both worlds.

The best team cultures are not the result of luck, or of the right personality combination, or of a single off-site retreat. They are the result of specific choices about how a team operates, what it values, how it handles conflict and accountability, and what kinds of conversations it makes normal and safe.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/35-essential-thought-leaders-on-team-culture