Jackie Jacobs is a distinguished lecturer and the director of the MS program in Management and Human Resources in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship in the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A native of New Jersey, Jackie received her bachelor’s degree from Penn State and her master’s degree from American University. She received her Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology from UT in 1997 and has served the university in a variety of roles. At the undergraduate level, Jacobs served as the Management 201 and 202 course coordinator for 10 years and has taught Principles of Management, Organizational Behavior and Development, Labor Relations, Implementation and Evaluation of Personnel Programs, and Foundations of Project Management. At the graduate level, she has served as a core faculty member in UT’s full-time MBA program and the MSMHR program and has taught Leading Complex Organizations, Personnel Administration, Foundations of HRM, Data-driven Decision Making and Project Management. She was also on the faculty of the Professional MBA program from 1999-2004 and taught seminars in Performance Appraisal and Evaluation, Compensation Design, Team Building and Conflict Management. Jacobs has also served as a trainer for the Institute for Public Service, where she coached participants on 360-Degree Performance Feedback and Conflict Resolution. She has been recognized for excellence in the classroom, winning the Haslam’s Allen Keally Outstanding Teaching Award in 2015, the UT Alumni Association’s Outstanding Teacher Award in 2022, the Richard Reizenstein Outstanding Commitment to Students Award in 2018, Faculty Advisor of the Year Award for her work with the Management Society in 2019, and was selected as an inaugural member in the Experience Learning Faculty Fellows program.

Her primary areas of research and applied work have focused on work teams, compensation, leadership, performance appraisal and training. Her research has been published in several journals, including Research in Organizational Behavior, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Leadership Quarterly, Training Research Journal, Journal of Quality Management and the American Compensation Journal. She has co-authored four book chapters and has presented over 19 papers at professional conferences such as the Academy of Management, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Southern Management Association and the American Psychological Association, and her work was selected for publication in the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings twice. In 2023, her submission received the “Best in Track” award at the annual conference of the Southern Management Association. She also received a grant from the American Compensation Association for her research on team-based reward systems. Jacobs served as a senior research associate on an Eastman Chemical/University of Tennessee National Science Foundation Grant from 1995-1997 and worked as consultant for the Tennessee Assessment Center. She took a few years off from teaching from 2005 to 2010 to dabble in entrepreneurship and was the owner of an iSold It on eBay franchise. She and her husband, Stan, have been married for 30 years and have three sons. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, gardening, scrapbooking, exercising and spending time with her family.