Fiona Edgar

Fiona Jacqueline Edgar (née McCullough) is a New Zealand management academic, and is a full professor at the University of Otago, specialising in human resource management and employment relations. As of 2024 she is head of the Department of Management at Otago.

Academic career
Edgar was the first business school recipient of a Bright Futures Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship. She completed a PhD titled Regulating for best practice in human resource management: The impact of the good employer obligation at the University of Otago in 2002. Her research was supervised by Mary Mallon, Ian McAndrew and Alan Geare. Edgar then joined the faculty of the Department of Management at the University of Otago, rising to associate professor in 2018 and full professor in 2023. As of 2024 she is head of Otago's Department of Management.

Egar's research focuses on the connection between human resource management and performance. She is concerned that employee views were considered in human resource management research. Edgar also researches how human resource management is linked to sustainability and organisational performance. In 2019, Edgar co-authored research that showed the cost to organisations of lost productivity due to employee alcohol use could be up to $1.65 billion annually.

Edgar is on the editorial boards of the journals Labour and Industry and The International Journal of Human Resource Management.

In 2008, Edgar was awarded an Early Career Researcher Award for Distinction in Research by the university. Edgar's 2009 paper with Alan Geare and Ian McAndrew, "Workplace Values and Beliefs: An Empirical Study of Ideology, High Commitment Management and Unionization", was chosen as one of the 50 best articles out of 15,000 published in the field in 2009.