Case 11: Gender-Inclusive Leadership for Innovation and Change: An HR Head’s Reflections

Payyazhi Jayashree (), Therese Sevaldsen () and Valerie Lindsay ()
Additional contact information
Payyazhi Jayashree: University of Wollongong in Dubai
Therese Sevaldsen: Philips, Middle East and Turkey
Valerie Lindsay: American University of Sharjah

A chapter in Strategic Human Resource Management and Employment Relations, 2022, pp 291-308 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Therese Sevaldsen was the Head of Human Resources at Philips Middle East and Turkey, based in the regional headquarters in Dubai, UAE. Throughout her years at Philips, she had led major HR transformation projects. Her passion, dedication and expertise had placed her as an influential role model at Philips. She was known to be business oriented, passionate about people and a strong advocate for women in leadership. She adopted a leadership style which was inclusive and based on trust. In addition, she tried to be an inspirational leader, providing clear direction, encouraging her team to challenge the status quo and leading them to implement new innovative HR solutions that better served internal and external customers. Prior to her role at Philips, Therese was the Head of HR for Schneider Electric in Dubai, a Fortune 500 Company with 2000 employees across 14 countries and 1 billion EUR revenue. Before this she had a number of business partner roles in Schneider Electric and other companies in the lighting and high tech industry. Therese was a mother of two school-aged boys. She enjoyed balancing her personal life with a very successful career. Activities like building Lego structures with her boys and family Sci-Fi movie evenings gave her immense pleasure. She had just returned from a Best Practices session, held this morning at the Dubai Business Women Council, as part of the International Women’s Day celebrations for 2017, in which her CEO had spoken about the various steps Philips was taking to ensure gender equality. It was only 2 days before that Therese and her team at Philips MET had received news that they had won an award for being among the best places to work within the UAE. This accolade was further validation for the key value espoused by Philips, which had people at its core (Exhibit 1). Further, as the Performance highlights in 2015 indicated, 1.7 billion lives had been improved by Philips Green Products alone, 0.88 billion lives by Philips Care Products and 0.3 billion by Philips wellbeing products (Philips Annual Report 2015, and Exhibit 2).

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sptchp:978-3-030-90955-0_27

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030909550

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-90955-0_27

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Texts in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().