Nicole Gillespie

Nicole Gillespie is Professor of Management and Chair in Organizational Trust at the University of Queensland, and an International Research Fellow at the Centre for Corporate Reputation, Oxford University. She co-leads the Trust, Ethics and Governance Alliance at the University of Queensland, is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and sits on the National AI Centre Thinktank on Responsible AI. In 2019, she was made a Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand School of Government in recognition of outstanding contribution to public management.

Nicole joined UQ in January 2010. Prior to this she held faculty and research positions at Melbourne Business School, Warwick Business School (UK), The Australian & New Zealand School of Government, The University of Melbourne, and Swinburne University of Technology.

Trained as an organizational psychologist, Nicole’s research focuses on trust development and repair in organisations and in contexts where trust is challenged (e.g. after a trust failure, in complex stakeholder environments, during organizational transformation and digital disruption, in emerging technologies and virtual healthcare, in cross-cultural relations). Current research projects focus on understanding stakeholder trust in organizations and industries, organizational trust repair, designing trustworthy organizations, and trust in Artificial Intelligence and adoption of emerging technologies. Her research appears in leading international journals, including the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of International Business Studies, Accounting Organizations and Society, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Services Research, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Human Resource Management, Sloan Management Review, Computers in Human Behavior, and Work and Stress, as well as in books and book chapters. She has also published in a range of health journals including Lancet Digital Health. Her work has been extensively presented in Europe, the USA and Australia. She is Deputy Editor of the Journal of Trust Research and on the editorial board of the leading leadership journal, Leadership Quarterly.

Nicole has written commissioned research reports and case studies on building and repairing stakeholder trust for the UK Institute of Business Ethics, the World Economic Forum, and a policy note for the UK Parliament on restoring trust in the financial sector after the global financial crisis. She has also collaborated with KPMG to produce though leadership and research reports including Trustworthy by Design: A practical guide to organisational trust ; Trust in Artificial Intelligence: A global study; Trust in AI: Country Insights and Achieving Trustworthy AI: A model for trustworthy artificial intelligence. Her research and consulting has led to positive changes in industry, government and policy across a range of sectors, including Health, Resources, Finance and Banking, Higher Education, R&D, Not-for-Profit and the Defence industry. Clients include the World Economic Forum, the Ontario Hospital Association, Barclays Bank, UBS Bank, Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, the Royal Flying Doctor Service, CSIRO, The Australian Army, Bank of Queensland, Santos, Origin Energy and various government agencies. She has attracted over $10million in research funding as a Chief Investigator with her colleagues, including ARC, NHMRC and industry grants. Nicole is an active member of the Academy of Management, the European Group of Organisational Studies, the First International Network on Trust and the Oxford Centre for Reputation and sits on multiple industry and scholarly advisory boards.

Nicole has over twenty years experience in designing and delivering MBA, Executive MBA, specialist masters and undergraduate courses. She is the recipient of five teaching excellence awards and multiple best paper awards, including from the Academy of Management (with former PhD student Mattia Anesa), and in 2016 received the UQ Business School Research Award.