Our people
Meet the academics, researchers and professional staff from the centre, who are all passionate about leadership and governance.
Professor Brigid Carroll, Director
Brigid is a Professor in the Department of Management and International Business and holds the Fletcher Building Employee Educational Fund Chair in Leadership. She teaches broadly in the area of leadership, organizational theory and qualitative research methods at undergraduate, postgraduate and executive level and does extensive cross sector leadership development work with corporate, community, professional, and youth organisations. In her development work Brigid has specialized in whole system, collaborative and cross organisation leadership development alongside a focus on leadership identity, mindset and practice. Increasingly she works with cross-faculty and interdisciplinary research and development teams. Brigid has recently begun a series of research and development work involving participatory, grassroots and adaptive governance, and complex, multi-sector collaboration.
Ongoing research themes revolve around identity work, power and resistance, leadership development, distributed and collective leadership and discursive/ narrative approaches. Ultimately Brigid is interested in leadership as a discourse, identity, and practice and in exploring how it is constructed and shaped between people, spaces, and artefacts in different organisational contexts.
She has written recently on the management/leadership relationship, the re-theorisation of role, the dynamics of leadership development, leadership as practice, and the relationship of leadership to constructs such as authenticity, resistance, aesthetics, responsibility and learning.
Brigid has co-edited three leadership books, Leadership, Contemporary Critical Issues, Responsible Leadership: Realism and Romanticism and After Leadership. She has published over 50 articles in journals such as Organization Studies, Human Relations, AMLE, Organization, Management Learning and Leadership. She is currently one of four editors on the new Sage Handbook of Leadership to be published in 2022.
In her spare time Brigid hangs out with her three sons and a menagerie of pets, likes to walk, cook and bake, enjoys film festival movies and loves to read classic and contemporary literature.
Professor Susan Watson, Director of Governance
Professor Susan Watson holds joint chairs in the Faculty of Law, and the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Auckland. She is the Dean of the University of Auckland Business School.
Professor Watson researches and teaches primarily corporate law and corporate governance. She has a particular interest in the corporate form and in her research seeks to understand how the form developed, why it is so successful, and the economic and societal impact of corporations. Her current monograph The Making of the Modern Company focusses on these questions. Her research has been published widely in New Zealand and internationally; she has edited and co-authored treatises and textbooks, five edited collections and numerous articles and book chapters. Her work has been cited and discussed by other scholars in the field and by courts at all levels including the UK Supreme Court.
Susan has co-authored a book and series of articles on the relationship between leadership and governance and is currently co-authoring a book that collates a set of case studies on prominent New Zealand companies also focussed on the leadership role of boards of directors She is a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) the only New Zealander to be appointed to date.
From 2007 until 2014 Susan was joint editor of the New Zealand Business Law Quarterly, and is currently the New Zealand editor for the Journal of Business Law. In 2016 she won the Legal Research Foundation Sir Ian Barker Published Article Award for How the Company Became an Entity - A New Understanding of Corporate Law. Her most recent book is Corporate Law in New Zealand (Thomson Reuters) jointly edited with Professor Lynne Taylor of Canterbury University.
Professor Watson has been a visiting Professor at Vanderbilt University (2008, 2012, 2018) Tilburg University where she was invited to teach courses on corporate governance. In 2018 she was a visiting academic in the Oxford Law Faculty. She was elected president of the Society of Corporate Law Academics (SCoLa) at the beginning of 2020; the first President for the Association elected from outside Australia where it is primarily based. She has organised conferences on corporate governance drawing leading national and international scholars and commentators in the field.
Dr Rhiannon Lloyd, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Kupe Leadership Scholarship
Rhiannon holds a PhD from Cardiff University, United Kingdom. She is a Senior Lecturer in Management and International Business at the University of Auckland. Rhiannon’s theoretical and empirical background is in the nexus of environmentalism and organisational theory, with her PhD (2014) exploring the green narratives of the UK energy industry with a particular focus on nuclear power. Within such institutional contexts she is particularly interested in the confluence of power, institutional logics, social movements, and forms of sustainable action. Such interests continue to underpin her current work on leadership, responsibility, and sustainability.
Over the past few years, Rhiannon’s teaching and research interests have focussed on student leadership development. Previously responsible for the undergraduate Dean’s Leadership award for the Business School, she is now Director of the prestigious postgraduate Kupe Leadership Scholarship. Alongside her leadership development work, she teaches critical management and organisational theory across undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her facilitation and teaching skills won her faculty level teaching excellence awards in 2018 and 2019, and the University’s Early Career Teaching Excellence Award in 2019.
Outside of academia, Rhiannon is an illustrator, fiction reader and keen hiker. She volunteers for West Auckland Hospice as a life reviewer and an ad-hoc bucket shaker.
Professor Maree Roche
Professor Maree Roche has expertise in three interconnected clusters: (1) leadership psychology, (2) employee wellbeing/mental health at work, and (3) indigenous, specifically Māori leadership and employee wellbeing, from a Māori/kaupapa perspective. Maree, Ngāti Raukawa, is also Manutaki of the Dame Mira Szászy Centre. She is a Fellow of the New Zealand Psychological Society, and Fellow of the USA Positive Organisational Behaviour Institute.
Maree’s research with the Centre focuses on leadership psychology. The leadership role has been described as one of increasing pressure to make decisions, react to the uncertain, while simultaneously being clear in one’s ability to influence others positively; to be able to think flexibly and to thrive within these ongoing changes and challenges.
These competing psychological drivers of thinking and behaviour are often described as the ‘soft skills’ of leadership, and the most important in the future of leadership (2024 Economic Forum Report). Maree’s research clearly demonstrates these are not soft skills, but ‘hard’ psychological skills understood within the mindset of leaders.
Dr Lynn Buckley
Lynn is a Lecturer with the Department of Commercial Law at He Manga Tauhokohoko University of Auckland Business School. Lynn’s research interests are in the field of company law, corporate governance, and sustainability. Her scholarship focuses on directors’ duties, director decision-making, corporate environmental sustainability, and corporate legal theory. She has a particular interest in contemporary regulatory debates in corporate law and the role of the board/duties of its directors in this context.
Originally from Ireland, Lynn attended the University of Limerick, Ireland, graduating with first class honours in both her Bachelor of Laws LLB (minor in psychology) and Master of International Commercial Law LLM. Lynn subsequently worked as a legal executive specialising in High Court personal injury and medical negligence litigation before moving to Aotearoa New Zealand for her doctoral studies. Lynn completed her doctoral thesis with the Faculty of Law at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland supported by a University of Auckland International Doctoral Scholarship.
Her thesis explored the scope of directors’ duty to act in good faith and in the best interests of the company in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a view to understanding the implications of the duty for environmental consideration in director decision-making. Her thesis was placed on the Dean’s List for academic excellence.
Dr Patricia Loga
Patricia’s work spans across several disciplinary areas including gender and ethnic equity in New Zealand’s public service, intersectional inclusion within New Zealand’s public service, and the evaluation of transdisciplinary research and path-dependency theory in a post-conflict state. She completed her doctoral studies at Massey University in management history and public policy, looking at the evolution of public administration and conflict in Fiji.
Patricia is a lecturer in the Department of Management and International Relations. Her ongoing work focusses on the areas of public service motivation, leadership and geo-political conflicts. Patricia is proudly Fijian, born and raised in Suva, previously studying at the University of the South Pacific.
Dr Nicola Russell
Nicola is the Senior Research Operations Coordinator for the Centre. Her role is primarily to manage centre activities and events, and to support the objectives of Centre members to advance research in leadership and governance.
She completed her doctoral thesis in 2023, through the Business School at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland, exploring the intersection of employee engagement and distributed leadership in the context of a New Zealand organisation. Her research interests include a critical framing of employee engagement, critical HRM, distributed and collective leadership, and discursive approaches to understanding work and people. While completing her PhD, she worked in various roles within the Business School including as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant.
Prior to her PhD, Nicola worked as an HR and Recruitment professional both in New Zealand and the UK with experience in banking and finance, retail, and the charity sector.
Dr Cassandra Joseph
Cassandra is a Postdoctoral Fellow researching leadership and organisation in social change movements. She has an academic background in Sociology and Gender Studies, having completed her PhD at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, the University of Otago in 2023. Her research interests include critical theory, identity politics, and norm-critical organising. She took on Teaching Assistant and Guest Lecturing roles during her PhD tenure and served as a Postgraduate Advisor. Her work has been published in the Journal of Gender Studies, and she has contributed chapters to an art history book on faith and architecture. Prior to her PhD, Cassandra has worked a range of jobs, some of which include teaching, content producing, scriptwriting, and show presenting at a zoo.
In her free time, Cassandra enjoys cooking up a storm, writing fiction, going on hikes, attempting flamenco music and psychoanalysing trashy reality shows with her wife.
Dr Asif Salahuddin
Asif is a Post-Doctoral Fellow, having graduated with his PhD in Corporate Law from Humboldt University of Berlin. He is also a Barrister (The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn | unregistered) having graduated from BPP Law School in London, UK. Asif has also worked as a visiting doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and as a Post-Doctoral Global Fellow at FGV Law School in São Paulo, Brazil, under the mentorship of Professor Mariana Pargendler who is currently a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. In addition, Asif was invited to Columbia Law School, University of California Berkeley School of Law, and Duke University School of Law for visiting scholar stays. He has also worked as a researcher for the US and global law firm WilmerHale in London, and as a lecturer in law in Bangladesh.
His research at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland focuses on comparative corporate law and corporate governance, particularly with concentration on ESG and sustainability, among others. His current project compares and scrutinises the legal regimes in the US, the UK, and the EU pertaining to fiduciary duty and duty of good faith, and their implication in relation to promoting ESG.
Affiliates of the Centre
The Aotearoa Centre for Leadership and Governance works in close collaboration with associate members within and external to the University.