Role
Dr Ishan Jalan is an Associate Professor in Leadership and Organisational Dynamics at Nottingham Business School, with over seventeen years of experience across undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral, and executive education. He teaches leadership, organisation theory and change management within the MBA and Executive MBA programmes, delivers doctoral training, and supervises doctoral researchers and MBA students. Drawing on psychodynamic and interpretive perspectives, his work explores the psychological, relational, and emotional dynamics of leadership, organisational life, and contemporary work.
Career overview
Since joining Nottingham Business School in 2018, Ishan has held a number of academic leadership roles, most notably serving as Head of Doctoral Programmes and Chair of the School Research Degrees Committee for five years. In these roles, he provided strategic leadership for doctoral education, overseeing more than 100 doctoral completions, the development of new doctoral pathways, the establishment of international partnerships, and the achievement of outstanding results in the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES).
Prior to joining NTU, he held academic appointments at Lancaster University, the University of Bath, and Lund University. He has also taught and delivered executive and doctoral education internationally, holding visiting appointments at institutions including EMLYON Business School, KEDGE Business School, the University of Lille, INSEEC, ISCTE Business School, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), GD Goenka University, and the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur (IIM-U).
Dr Jalan completed his PhD at the University of Bath under the supervision of Professor Yiannis Gabriel. He also holds MSc in Organisational and Social Psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, a BA (Hons) in Sociology and Philosophy, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice from Lancaster University.
He is a Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (AFBPsS), a Fellow of Advance HE (FHEA), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
Alongside his academic career, Dr Jalan is an experienced psychodynamic coach and organisational development consultant, providing executive coaching, leadership development, and consultancy services to leaders and organisations internationally.
Research areas
Dr Ishan Jalan's research sits at the intersection of organisation studies and psychoanalysis and is concerned with understanding the human experience of organising. His work explores how individuals and groups navigate the emotional, relational, political, and often unconscious dimensions of organisational life, particularly in contexts characterised by uncertainty, vulnerability, authority, and change.
Drawing on organisational theory and psychoanalytic thought, he examines the relationship between individual experience and organisational systems, with particular attention to how leadership, identity, emotions, and subjectivity are shaped within contemporary organisations. A central concern of his scholarship is understanding the hidden and often unconscious dynamics that influence authority, employee voice, psychological safety, wellbeing, belonging, and meaning at work.
His research spans a range of organisational settings and phenomena, including healthcare and emergency services, organisational crisis, whistleblowing, grief and loss, storytelling, sustainability, and contemporary constructions of masculinity. Across these diverse contexts, a unifying theme is an interest in how people respond to challenge and adversity, sustain themselves, others, and the work they undertake, and create meaning under conditions of complexity and pressure. He has a particular interest in healthcare, wellbeing, and crisis contexts, where the emotional and relational dimensions of work are especially pronounced.
As Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator, Dr Jalan has led and contributed to a range of externally funded research projects, including Knowledge Transfer Partnerships and European-funded initiatives. His work seeks to advance understanding of the human and organisational dimensions of contemporary challenges, bringing insights from organisation studies and psychoanalysis to questions of leadership, work, and organisational change.
Dr Jalan welcomes enquiries from prospective doctoral researchers interested in leadership, organisational dynamics, emotions, wellbeing, whistleblowing, healthcare, and related areas within organisation studies and psychoanalytic scholarship.
Press expertise
Leadership, Work Psychology, Mental health and Wellbeing