logo

Jean-François Stich

  • Home
  • CV & Publications
  • Research
  • Teaching
  • Blog

My Teaching Interests

My main discipline is Organizational Behavior, which investigates human behavior in organizational settings. I became fascinated by this discipline by learning about famous social psychology studies such as the Stanford prison experiment and the Hawthorne Studies.

This discipline is not teaching readily actionable skills such as doing a balance sheet in accounting or designing a recruitment strategy in human resources. Instead, it gives its students weapons to better fight the social and psychological processes influencing workers including themselves. Actionable skills are certainly needed, but these analytical abilities are what makes them more reflective future managers or colleagues.

As an example, I teach theories explaining motivation, performance, sources of power, group norms, team development or organizational culture. They can be applied not only to workplaces but also in all situations in which groups of people work together towards common goals.

Current Modules Taught

  • Human Resource Management

    This course is an introduction to Human Resources in organizations. It covers themes such as recruitment, training, retention, motivation, performance and reward. A focus is also given on fighting discrimination and promoting equality and diversity.

  • Digitization of Human Resources

    This course is about the impact of technology on human resource management. It covers themes such as HR information systems, tech start-ups in HR, ICT-related stress and work-life balance, and many other themes related to my research.

  • Sustainable Human Resource Management

    This course is an introduction to sustainability and corporate social responsibility in the context of human resource management. It shows how HR activities can be tailored for sustainable development and for social enterprises.

My Teaching Philosophy

Theoretical Rigour

Knowledge and theories must be core to business practice. Evidence-based practitioners use scientific evidence to make better and more informed decisions.

My teaching thus gives much importance to learning theories and evidence.

For example, Janis' groupthink theory suggests that teams can make worse or extreme decisions when they start believing in their superiority, stereotyping opponents or minimizing internal conflict. Involving outsiders or encouraging people to air concerns or endorse a devil's advocate role can help to reduce groupthink and make better decisions.

Work Based Learning

The temptation is strong to forget all about theories once outside the classroom or graduated. Theories learned at university are supplies gathered for future use.

This is why I focus on using work based learning to help students use these supplies when needed:

  • Internships are a way to immediately apply what has been learnt in the classroom. Students must seize this opportunity.
  • Case studies and Business games can help students practice applying theories to real life business situations.

Learning With Passion

Learning is not easy, it requires focus and dedication. But I believe it can be made easier with passion and engagement.

As positive attitudes foster engagement, I do my best to share my passion for my discipline:

  • Recommended extracurricular activities such as readings, visits, films or even video games related to the lectures help students engage with the theories outside of the classroom.
  • Online learning serves similar purposes. Students can learn at their own pace and to the extent they desire using online material (such as MOOCs) or boardrooms.

My Teaching Toolbox

Organizational Behavior Textbooks

  • My favorite OB textbook. Comprehensive and clear coverage, plenty of case studies and reflective activities.
  • The most well-known OB textbook and one of the best.
  • A great textbook on leadership. Few pictures but strong content and lots of measurement scales.
  • A freely available online textbook on Management! It can be customized as well.

Software and devices

  • polleverywhere (Real-time voting)

    By using polleverywhere, students can answer questions during the lecture with their smartphones or computers. Great way to involve even the shiest ones!
  • Moodle (Learning platform)

    Moodle is an open-source e-learning platform. It is a very comprehensive software with plenty of features such as document sharing, marking...
  • LibreOffice (Presentation)

    LibreOffice Impress is a free open-source alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. Most of my lectures rely on presentations.
  • Clickers (Real-time voting)

    This is like polleverywhere but using a physical device. It is more reliable than asking students to use their various smartphones.

Engaging material

Films on Work and Management

  • Striking French drama on consulting/auditing jobs.
  • French drama on challenges faced by a young HR consultant
  • Excellent French drama on bureaucracy and employment
  • Hilarious comedy on bureaucracy and work-life balance! Classic!
  • French comedy/thriller on work interviews... Everybody has had this idea once
  • Classic thriller on negotiation and sales
  • Drama/romance on work-life balance in consulting jobs
  • Excellent thriller on trading
  • Recruitement/wellbeing advice by the "Business School of échec". Hilarious French comedy
  • Horror movie with nice scenes on corporate status
  • French comedy in which poor management leads to extreme career choices...
  • French comedy on salesmen in Galeries Lafayette
  • Bill Gates & Steve Jobs fighting as tech entrepreneurs

TV shows on Work and Management

  • The Office (US). My favorite TV show of all time... A comedy full of managerial mistakes!
  • The Office (UK). Hilarious as well although I prefer the US version
  • Dilbert is also a victim of poor management! This time in the IT industry
  • Good TV show on consulting jobs
  • Advertising industry in the 60-70s
  • Tech entrepreneurs/startup in the silicon valley
Note: the links are sponsored. If you discovered these books or DVDs through my website and consider buying them, I would appreciate if you do so using these links to help me cover the web hosting costs.

Latest teaching blog posts

    Scroll to top

    Article Categories

    • Research 13
    • Impact 5
    • Fiction 6
    • Opinion 2

    Article Tags

    • Work
    • Technology
    • Publication
    • Stress
    • Telework
    • Email
    • Human Resources
    • Research

    Latest articles

  • Micro-récits de science-fiction : recherche et travail virtualisé en 2060
  • Habilitation à diriger des recherches : Psychologie et Gestion du Travail Virtualisé
  • PhD dissertation: Email Stress and Desired Email Use
  • No cookie is collected. Please contact me if you want to share your browsing experience. To learn more about what is under the hood, look at the source code.

    Licence Creative Commons
    Unless stated otherwise, the content is licensed under CC-BY-SA.

    Contact me

    • contact@jfstich.com
    • +33.6.59.72.32.33
    • jfstich
    • @jfstich
    • jfstich
    • ResearchGate
    • VCard