Johanna is an Associate Professor in the DAN Department of Management and Organizational Studies. She joined the faculty at Western in 2012 after spending four years at the Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary's University in Halifax. Johanna is cross-appointed in the I/O Psychology Area at Western where she supervises graduate students. She is also an Affiliate to the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Western. Johanna is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in labour and employment relations.

Johanna is interested in questions related to worker power, control, agency, and participation in the local and social regulation of work. A primary area of research is Game Production Studies where she examines topics of workplace citizenship, representation and unionization, working conditions and the labour process, project management and occupational identity in the global digital game industry. She has produced comprehensive open access reports on the industry for over 15 years through the IGDA Developer Satisfaction Survey. Johanna has also published research related to labour's capital, education-job mismatch, pregnancy leave policies and industrial relations climate.

Johanna is a Past President of the Canadian Industrial Relations Association (CIRA), a past member of the International Labour and Employment Relations Association (ILERA) Executive Committee, President of the Editorial Committee of the Canadian employment relations journal Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations and a member of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT).  Johanna is also a union activist having served as President and Negotiator for her faculty union.