Professor Katie Bailey

Professor

School: Newcastle Business School

Katie Bailey is Professor of Leadership and HRM at Newcastle Business School, and Emerita Professor of Work and Employment at King's College London. Previously, she has held roles at the universities of Sussex, Kent and Kingston. Katie has been on the senior leadership team of four business schools. She is currently also a lay member of the ACCA Qualifications Board and of the RICS Qualifications and Assessment Committee.

Katie works extensively with practitioners and founded the Kingston Employee Engagement Consortium at Kingston University as well as the Meaning and Purpose Network (MaPNet) at King's College.

Previously, she has been a Trustee at the Involvement and Participation Association, Chief External Examiner for the Global MBA Programme at London Business School and member of ReWAGE, the Renewing Work Advisory Group of Experts. She has been Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Management Reviews, Associate Editor at Work, Employment and Society and Human Resource Management Journal, and a member of the editorial board of numerous other journals.

She completed her PhD at London Business School, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the Higher Education Academy, as well as Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Employment Studies. Katie is also a member of the Association for Coaching and works freelance as a coach, specialising in supporting academics in developing their careers.

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Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

Katie's research currently focuses on meaningful work, callings, craft and temporality. She has also conducted research into work engagement, gender, and human resource management. She has published on these topics in both scholarly peer-reviewed journals and practitioner journals such as the Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review. Katie also regularly speaks at international academic and practitioner conferences and her research features in news outlets such as the Times, Financial Times, Management Today, People Management and Forbes. She recently spoke about her research on meaningful work on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. Katie is co-author of the textbook Strategic Human Resource Management (OUP, 2019) as well as co-editor of Employee Engagement in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2015) and the Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work (OUP, 2019). Her most recent book is The Purpose-Driven Organisation in Times of Climate Crisis (Routledge, 2026), co-edited with Katie Manning. Her awards include the 2021 5-year Scholarly Impact Award from Human Resource Management Review; the 2020 Elwood F Holton III Research Excellence Award from the Academy of Human Resource Development; and the 2019 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize from the MIT Sloan Management Review. She is included in the Stanford list of the top 2% of most-cited scholars in her field.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Employee purpose internalization: a sensemaking perspective, Sandoghdar, A., Bailey, C., Yang, W. 11 Sep 2026, In: European Management Review
Experiencing meaningful work through worthwhile contributions: A critical discourse analysis, Bailey, C., Madden, A., Lips-Wiersma, M. 1 May 2025, In: Human Relations
The Purpose-Driven Organisation in Times of Climate Crisis, Bailey, K., Manning, K. 30 Oct 2025
Ethics and the Future of Meaningful Work: Introduction to the Special Issue, Lysova, E., Tosti-Kharas, J., Michaelson, C., Fletcher, L., Bailey, C., McGhee, P. 1 Jul 2023, In: Journal of Business Ethics
Walking back to happiness: the resurgence of latent callings in later life, Sturges, J., Bailey, K. 1 Aug 2023, In: Human Relations
What Makes a Great Corporate Purpose Statement, Bailey, C., Tilley, C., Sandoghdar, A. 11 Sep 2023, In: Harvard Business Review
When Time Falls Apart: Re-centring human time in organisations through the lived experience of waiting, Bailey, C., Suddaby, R. 1 Jul 2023, In: Organization Studies
Employee engagement: Do practitioners care what academics have to say – And should they?, Bailey, C. 1 Mar 2022, In: Human Resource Management Review
Why We Don’t Talk About Meaning at Work, Lips-Wiersma, M., Bailey, C., Madden, A., Morris, L. 7 Jun 2022
Developing Insights through Reviews: Reflecting on the 20th Anniversary of the International Journal of Management Reviews, Breslin, D., Gatrell, C., Bailey, K. Jan 2020, In: International Journal of Management Reviews