Maria Karanika-Murray

Maria Karanika-Murray is a Professor of Work and Organisational Psychology at the School of Business, University of Leicester. Her PhD (University of Nottingham, 2007) focused on the use of alternative analytical approaches for strengthening the assessment of psychosocial risks in the workplace. As a part-time PhD student and researche assistant at the University of Nottingham, Maria led a number of projects as part of a European consortium delivering for the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work.
Her research focuses on the relationship between well-being and performance, organisational health interventions (including their development, implementation and evaluation), sickness presenteeism and attendance behaviours, and work-non-work integration and specifically the experience of parents at work. Maria has delivered a range of funded research projects for the European Commission, European Agency for Safety & Health at Work, Social Sciences and Health Research Council of Canada, Economic and Social Research Council, Rethink Mental Illness, Heart Research, and industry partners.
Her research outputs span theory (e.g., presenteeism; work process; inequality) and empirical research (e.g. multilevel and longitudinal approaches). She has written widely for academic researchers, policy-makers, and practitioner audiences. She has pioneered collections in intervention process evaluation (Karanika-Murray & Biron, 2015: Derailed organizational interventions for stress and well-being: Confessions of failure, solutions for success, Springer; Biron, Karanika-Murray & Cooper 2012: Improving organizational interventions for stress and well-being: Addressing process and context, Routledge) and new parents’ return to work (Karanika-Murray & Cooper, 2020: Navigating the return-to-work experience for new parents: Maintaining work-family well-being, Routledge). Her work on presenteeism received the Human Relations Paper of the Year Award 2020 (Karanika-Murray & Biron, 2020: The health-performance framework of presenteeism: Towards understanding an adaptive behaviour).