---
id: "pisquared:interview/kulikcarol"
type: "Pi-Squared interview"
title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Carol Kulik"
url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/kulikcarol"
date: "2026-07-06"
people: ["Anita McGahan","Carol Kulik"]
summary: "Carol T. Kulik is a Bradley Distinguished Professor at Adelaide University, College of Business and Law, and a senior researcher in the Centre for Workplace..."
recording: "https://vimeo.com/1211549050"
source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change"
licence: "none stated"
---

# Anita McGahan in conversation with Carol Kulik

Carol Kulik, Bradley Distinguished Professor, Adelaide University · 6 July 2026

## About the guest

Carol T. Kulik is a Bradley Distinguished Professor at Adelaide University, College of Business and Law, and a senior researcher in the Centre for Workplace Excellence. She is also the co-author of Human Resources for the Non-HR Manager (2023, Routledge), a book that makes the latest research on people management accessible to managers with no formal training in human resources. Professor Kulik believes that management research is making the world a better place, one manager, one workplace at a time. Professor Kulik's research focuses on how organisations can manage employee diversity and create more inclusive workplaces. Her research identifies strategies for narrowing gender pay gaps, retaining and engaging mature-age workers, and designing meaningful work in the age of AI. She is highly cited and influential across the entire field of Management.

## Reflections from the interview

**Professor Carol Kulik **is renowned for her scholarly research on workplace excellence.  She talks with Anita about how she began her career in thinking about employee-center topics such as job design, employee experience, and motivation.   As her interests turned toward understanding the structures that employees create, and how they benefit the employer as well as the employee, she began to appreciate just how baked-in structural problems could become.  Her massive body of work on DEI, the gender pay gap, and mature-age workers have led her to a range of insights on the silver linings that arise as stakeholders demand change.   She is now thinking about how AI can be deployed by line managers to reshape jobs to make them even more meaningful for employees and efficient for employers.  But getting this right is not assured.  We need to focus intently to make this happen.

## Related resources

- [Carol’s profile at Adelaide](https://adelaide.edu.au/people/Carol.Kulik)
- [Carol on Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0HsRLIUAAAAJ&hl=en)
- [Carol’s seminal paper on motivation](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014920639902500302)
- [Carol’s recent paper on ecosystems and career outcomes](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263237325000374)
- [Carol’s work on male champions](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0007681325000266)

## Recording

Video: https://vimeo.com/1211549050

## Category

[Where Do We Go From Here?](https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/category/where-next)

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Original page: https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/kulikcarol · Licence: none stated