Jochen’s research focus is on the social dynamics between leaders and followers and on the role of emotions and motivation in organisational life. Jochen examines, for example, what makes leaders charismatic, how charismatic leaders affect followers, how leaders infuse emotions in those who look up to them, how leaders develop and use emotional intelligence, how emotions spread to affect collectivities, and how organisations can create cultures that feature high levels of engagement and low levels of exhaustion.

In his research, teaching and consulting, Jochen has worked with companies and organisations such as Ambrosetti, British Telecom, Google, Jaguar Land Rover, L’Oreal, Microsoft, Nordea, Save the Children, Waldburg Zeil Hospitals, and The World Bank. Jochen has taught at startup incubators such as Plug & Play in Silicon Valley and The Venture Cafe Foundation in Boston. Jochen is also an expert on the medium-sized companies of the Mittelstand, the backbone of Germany’s economy. He led a major employer quality assessment study, for which he evaluated more than 450 Mittelstand companies in Germany regarding their potential to attract and retain talent.

Jochen is amongst the founders of the Experimental Laboratory at Cambridge Judge Business School. He conducts carefully controlled experiments to understand the causality of the social dynamics that he observes in organisations, as well as survey and archival studies. Jochen is a member of the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal (2016-2019) and The Leadership Quarterly (since 2016), and served as consulting editor of Emotion (2012-2015). He has also been an executive board member of the International Society for Emotional Intelligence since 2012, and an expert member for the Emotion Revolution in the Workplace project by the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence.