Keynote Speaker Professor Jarrod Haar (PhD)

Professor Jarrod Haar (PhD), of Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Mahuta descent, is a Professor of Management and Māori Business, in the School of Management, College of Business (Albany). Jarrod received his PhD in Organisational Behaviour/Human Resource Management from the University of Waikato, and was a recipient of a Tumate Mahuta Memorial Scholarship (PhD) from Tainui.

Past appointments include a Professor of HRM at AUT, an Associate Professor at  Waikato University; a Senior Research Fellow with the University of Auckland working on a major health initiative for Maori, and as a lecturer at Te Wananga o Aotearoa.

I have a love of research, quantitative methods, and Māori advancement. I am extremely proud to be a Māori academic and I am always seeking opportunities to maximise my research leadership and Māori research contribution. Under New Zealand’s PBRF, I am a world class ranked researcher and I enjoy mentoring colleagues and students towards publishing research (including top-ranked journals). Broadly, my research focuses on employees (e.g., wellbeing, job burnout, work-life balance, teams, leaders-followers) and employers (e.g., firm innovation, HR practices, entrepreneurship, retention). Within both aspects, I have a strong interest in Māori cultural factors including mātauranga Māori in business.

More recently, I have brought a renewed focus on research execution not only with publications but specifically media engagement. This involves numerous media and keynote presentations to make a significant contribution to Aotearoa employers and employees. In this covid-context, I was able to balance my research publishing role with providing public interest engagement (e.g., Great Resignation, burnout). This new focus on media before academia has been an interesting challenge and change, but one I readily enjoy.

In 2018, Professor Haar was appointed as a Member of the Marsden Fund Council and was the Convenor of the Marsden Economics and Human Behavioural Sciences panel for four years (until 2021). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi (2020), a Research Fellow of the Australia & New Zealand Academy of Management (since 2012), and a Chartered Fellow of the Human Resource Institute of New Zealand (HRINZ). He won the inaugural HRINZ HR Researcher of the Year Award in 2016 and in 2019, the HRINZ HR Research Team of the Year.

How leadership, inclusion, and workplace culture impact resilience and innovation

In his keynote, Professor Jarrod Haar will explore:

• The realities of workforce diversity vs. true inclusion – and how we can shift from awareness to action.
• Lessons from mātauranga Māori and Maori business models that can help industries build resilience and adapt to change.
• How workplace wellbeing and leadership directly impact innovation and long-term business success.