Maral's research explores the future of work, with a particular focus on hybrid work and leadership. She studies how hybrid and remote work arrangements affect employees’ well-being and performance, and the role of leaders in shaping these outcomes. As part of her starting grant, Maral is currently working on a big research project investigating the reasons why employees choose to work from home or in the office. In one of the projects, she examines how organizational performance incentives shape employees’ location choices across a series of experiments in collaboration with researchers from NYU Stern. Complementing this work, Maral also investigates how employees’ daily motivations and social environments influence their work location decisions, with a related project in collaboration with scholars from KU Leuven, Istanbul University and Lingan University in Hong Kong.
In addition, Maral is working on several projects related to gender and leadership, with the overarching questions of whether men and women differ in actual leadership behaviors and how these behaviors are perceived differently.
Her work has been published in leading international journals, such as the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Work & Stress, and Stress and Health and several of her projects are currently under Revise and Resubmit at top-tier journals, such as Organization Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Leadership Quarterly. Her work on hybrid work has been featured in major Dutch media, including Het Parool, Algemeen Dagblad (AD), and BNR Nieuwsradio.
