Professor Jochen Menges holds the Chair of Human Resource Management and Leadership at the Department of Business Administration and serves as the Director of the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work at the University of Zurich. 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. He also works as a Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and has previously served as the Chair of Leadership and HRM at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management in Düsseldorf.

Professor Menges’s research focuses on the social dynamics between leaders and followers, and on the role of emotions and motivation in organizational life. He studies how leaders can successfully inspire people to pursue collective goals and how people can work together in ways that contribute to their productivity and well-being. He has published his work, for example, in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Harvard Business Review. Professor Menges is an Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Discoveries and a member of the Editorial Boards of the Academy of Management Journal and The Leadership Quarterly; previously he was a Consulting Editor for Emotion. He received several awards for his research, among them in 2019 the Annual Prize for the Best Leadership-related Article (Institute for Leadership, Ivey Business School) and in 2016 the Annals of the Academy of Management Best Article Award for his work on group emotions. His discoveries have been featured in two TEDx talks and 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. He has also given two TEDx talks that have been watched online more than 100,000 times.

Professor Menges has lectured at all academic levels and received multiple best teacher awards. Professor Menges 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 300’000 Euro in support of the work of Save the Children, a leading independent children’s rights organization. 

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, Google, Jaguar Land Rover, L'Oreal, Microsoft, Nordea, Rolls-Royce, Trivago, and The World Bank. As a co-founder of the Global HR Valley, which is 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. He 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.

When Professor Menges is not writing papers or sharing leadership insights, he loves spending time with his wife and three children. No pets yet, but he sees himself on the losing side of that discussion...

Publications