Nik Steffens

Nik is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Business and Organisational Psychology (CBOP) in UQ's School of Psychology. He lived, worked, and studied psychology in Germany and Spain and completed his PhD in the UK before working at The University of Queensland (Australia).

Nik conducts fundamental and applied research to uncover psychological drivers that make groups and organisations fairer, more motivating, more effective, and healthier. His expertise lies in social identity and team work processes in social and organisational contexts including leadership and followership, motivation and creativity, and health and well-being. He uses diverse methods to understand people and organisations including experimental and intervention studies, field and survey research, archival methods, psychometric scale development, and systematic reviews and meta-analysis.

His work has been supported by several bodies including the Australian Research Council (e.g., he was awarded an ARC DECRA fellowship in 2018), the Australian Government, and several industry research-partnerships (with public and private organisations). In 2017, he won the APS Workplace Excellence Award for Leadership Development (together with Alex Haslam and Kim Peters) for his work with industry partners on the 5R leadership development program that seeks to help leaders to develop their leadership ability and enhance team functioning and well-being (https://tinyurl.com/adfu7xbu). He consults to organisations around social and organisational challenges and he is an (IECL-certified) orgnisational coach.

Nik is a co-founding member of the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) network of global leadership scholars, and serves on the Editorial Board of the European Journal of Social Psychology, and the flagship journal for leadership research, The Leadership Quarterly. He is Editor (with Michelle Ryan and Floor Rink) of the 'Organisational Psychology: Revisiting the Classic studies' published in 2023 as part of SAGE's classic studies in psychology series (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/organisational-psychology/book269849).