George MichaelidesProfessor of Work Psychology

Work psychology · UEA

George Michaelides

Professor of Work Psychology · University of East Anglia

Researching work and standard deviations.

Read my workPhD supervision
Portrait of George Michaelides

In brief

I study how people navigate the boundary between work and the rest of their lives, and how organisations can design work that leaves people more whole than it found them. Most of my work lives in work and organisational psychology: assessment, wellbeing, personality, the daily texture of working life. On methods I lean Bayesian by persuasion (statistics for people who can admit they had opinions before they saw the data), and have spent an unreasonable amount of time on Generalizability theory, telling anyone who'll listen that their ratings are probably confounded.

I'm Professor of Work Psychology at Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia, where I am Course Leader for the MSc in Organisational Psychology. I arrived in 2018 as an Associate Professor and was promoted to full Professor in 2024.

My route here has been non-linear: a PhD in Business and Management at Nottingham, then Research Associate spells at Sheffield and Nottingham Trent, with teaching posts at Birkbeck and the LSE along the way. Each place left a mark; none of them left me with a sensible accent.

My research has been funded by the ESRC, SIOP, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, and the College of Policing, a list that sounds incongruous until you realise it's all "how do people cope at work, and can we measure it?" I'm an Associate Editor at the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, sit on the editorial board of Human Performance, and review for the ESRC Peer Review College and a rogues' gallery of leading journals. Chartered Psychologist, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and, despite everything, an optimist about measurement.

Currently

Where things stand.

Selected publications

A short reading list.

Five papers that, taken together, sketch the shape of what I work on. For the full list (sorted, filterable, and updated as things go to press), see the publications page.

  1. 01

    Petrou, P., den Dulk, L., & Michaelides, G. (2026). The leisure crafting intervention: Effects on work and non-work outcomes and the moderating role of age. Human Relations. doi:10.1177/00187267251407641

    A field intervention showing that helping employees deliberately shape their non-work time improves work outcomes, with younger workers benefiting most.

  2. 02

    Jackson, D. J. R., Michaelides, G., Dewberry, C., & Kim, Y. J. (2016). Everything that you have ever been told about assessment center ratings is confounded. Journal of Applied Psychology. doi:10.1037/apl0000102

    A widely-cited paper that re-examined the statistical foundations of assessment centres and reset the conversation about what we can actually conclude from rating data.

  3. 03

    Jackson, D. J., Michaelides, G., Dewberry, C., Schwencke, B., & Toms, S. (2020). The implications of unconfounding multisource performance ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology. doi:10.1037/apl0000434

    Building on that thread: a closer look at how the standard approach to combining multi-source ratings has been quietly misleading, and what to do instead.

  4. 04

    Michaelides, G., Niven, K., Wood, S., & Inceoglu, I. (2024). A dual-process model of the effects of boundary segmentation on work–nonwork conflict. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. doi:10.1111/joop.12526

    A model explaining why integrating work and life is not always better than keeping them apart, and what predicts the difference.

  5. 05

    Fitzhugh, H., Michaelides, G., Daniels, K., Connolly, S., & Nasamu, E. (2024). Mindfulness for performance and wellbeing in the police. Review of Public Personnel Administration. doi:10.1177/0734371X231155794

    Work with the College of Policing on a mindfulness programme that improved both wellbeing and operational performance, recognised as the journal's best paper of the year.

    Best Paper Award 2024

See all 74 works

Get in touch

If my work is relevant to yours.

I read everything that lands in my inbox, though I cannot always reply quickly. The quickest way to reach me is by email. For prospective PhD applicants, please see the supervision page before writing.