About
Dr Jelena Petrovic is a Principal Enterprise Fellow and Associate Professor of Strategic Leadership within Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton.
Jelena has secured a management Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) funding worth £180,000 from the UK Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) as a Lead Academic. The mKTP is a strategic management-based project aimed at driving effectiveness through better management practices and bringing strategic leadership skills to an SME, which would result in business innovation and growth.
Jelena welcomes PhD applications in strategic leadership, which is about understanding of how individual and group behaviour at top management and board level influences organisational outcomes.
She is particularly interested in supervising PhDs that are in the following areas:
- HR professional influence on business strategy
- CEO pay: A behavioural perspective
- Board dynamics and board effectiveness
Research
Research interests
- Board directors and top management teams
- CEO pay
- HR professional influence on business strategy
- International joint ventures
Current research
Jelena's research is in strategic leadership, which focuses on understanding of how individual and group behaviour at top management and board level influences organisational outcomes. Strategic leadership research takes insights from corporate governance, organisational behaviour, behavioural science, and strategic management.
Jelena's current research interests are in:
1) HR professional contribution to business strategy (surprisingly, few academic studies take into account specific properties of top management teams and boards that result in complex dynamics that impact on HR professional strategic influence).
2) CEO pay - A behavioural perspective (a different perspective to the economic and finance perspective that traditionally dominated a debate on CEO pay)
Publications
Supervision
Current PhD Students
Teaching
Jelena is committed to high quality teaching and research. She is a Senior Fellow of The Higher Education Academy and a Certified Management and Business Educator and has been nominated for various learning and teaching awards.
Biography
Jelena has over 25 years of experience in teaching, research and consultancy in the UK and internationally. She has an Emerald / European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) award winning PhD from Cranfield University, which focuses on the role and contribution of board directors in international joint ventures. She also has received a FCO Chevening Scholarship for my MSc in HRM at University of Surrey. In addition, she holds a BSc and MSc in Engineering Management from University of Belgrade.
Jelena has always been interested in enterprise activities as she strongly believes in the link between research and practice. She has significant experience in executive education and consultancy. She has developed a portfolio of executive development programmes in strategic and operational leadership and governance. This attracted companies such as Volvo Cars and Park Plaza Hotels, which involved understanding client expectations and resulted in her design and delivery of a number of short courses and workshops. This also included high-profile executive education programmes for HR practitioners from across Latin America, supported by the BBC, Sony, London Stock Exchange, Lloyds of London, and the Lord Mayor of the City of London.
In addition, Jelena has designed and delivered workshops for the NHS and delivered executive short courses as part of the joint venture between the Cranfield School of Management and a US consultancy (previously ORC Worldwide, now Mercer).
Jelena has built practitioner networks in different sectors, industries, and professional backgrounds and created various partnerships between the universities she has worked for, which have enhanced the universities’ external profile. In addition, she is Chair of the CIPD South West London Branch Committee. This pro bono position provides her with a great opportunity to directly engage with industry and play an active role in shaping the CIPD agenda.
Jelena has spoken at a number of internationally recognised conferences and events, published in journals such as the Journal of Management Inquiry, and Corporate Governance, and contributed chapters to books published by Palgrave Macmillan. In addition, she has conducted research and consultancy in international HRM for organisations such as ORC Worldwide, the CIPD, the Guardian, and BT.
Jelena's research has been submitted to REF 2021. She has also written the case study material that has been published and used for teaching.
For most of her time in academia, Jelena has been involved in programme leadership, including development, design and delivery of teaching and assessment, strategic planning, curriculum development, validations, quality assurance and accreditation management, leading the team in charge of programme delivery, collaboration with marketing, admissions, career, student support teams and alumni teams, staffing and budget responsibility. Among others, Jelena was Director of MSc Leadership and Management in Health programme, which was a cross-school, major collaborative programme between Kingston University, Royal Holloway and St. Georges University of London.