Jochen Menges
How can people be lifted to feel and do their best at work, today and tomorrow? That is the question that Professor Jochen Menges focuses on as the Chair of Human Resource Management and Leadership at the Department of Business Administration and as the Director of the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work at the University of Zurich. He studies how emotions drive behavior in organizations, how leaders effectively interact with and influence followers, and how people prepare for the future in an ever changing world of work.
His research has been published in top-tier academic outlets such as the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He received several awards for his research, among them the Annual Prize for the Best Leadership-related Article (Institute for Leadership, Ivey Business School,2019) and the Annals of the Academy of Management Best Article Award for his work on group emotions (Los Angeles, 2016). He regularly writes for Harvard Business Review and his discoveries have been featured in the media around the world, for example, by the BBC, CNN, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and Die Zeit. His two TEDx talks and online videos have been watched more than 150,000 times.
In his research, teaching and consulting, Professor Menges has worked with a diverse set of companies and organizations including The Adecco Group, The Boston Consulting Group, British Telecom, Daimler, easyJet, the European Commission, Google, Grey, Jaguar Land Rover, L'Oreal, Media Arts Lab, Microsoft, Nordea, Rolls-Royce, Trivago, the UK’s Cabinet Office, and The World Bank. As a co-founder of the Global HR Valley®, a future-of-work ecosystem that is part of the Reskilling Revolution of the World Economic Forum, he builds a platform together with prominent businesses to prepare leaders and organizations for a changing world of work. As part of these efforts, Professor Menges and his colleague Professor Howe have launched a global CHRO survey and a global future-of-work study that compares views about the future across 35 countries. In the past, Professor Menges led a major employer quality assessment study, for which he gathered survey responses from more than 60,000 employees and evaluated more than 450 companies in Germany regarding their potential to attract and retain talent.
Professor Menges has lectured at all academic levels and received multiple best teacher awards. He has also taught at start-up incubators such as Plug & Play in Silicon Valley and The Venture Café Foundation in Boston, as well as at prestigious military academies, such as The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the UK and The Center for Leadership in Germany. Together with his students, Professor Menges launched the Future Leaders Fundraising Challenge, a one-week intense leadership course that has meanwhile raised more than 500’000 Euro in support of the work of Save the Children, a leading independent children’s rights organization.
Professor Menges is an Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Discoveries and a member of the Editorial Board of The Leadership Quarterly; previously, he was a Consulting Editor for Emotion and served on the Editorial Board of the Academy of Management Journal. He has been a Subject Matter Expert of the Academy of Management and an executive board member of the International Society for Emotional Intelligence, and he also serves as an expert member for the Emotion Revolution in the Workplace project by the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence. Professor Menges is also on the faculty of Cambridge Judge Business School , where he is at amongst the founders of the Experimental Laboratory and a member of the Organizational Behaviour group.
He received his doctoral degree in management from the University of St. Gallen, spent a year at the Graduate School of Arts and Science at Yale University, and completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology at the University of Heidelberg, supported by a scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation.
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