Shibaab is a lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra. His research interests lie at the intersection of public administration and organisation theory. He is interested in understanding the impact of social embeddedness on human behaviour and how it pertains to organisational stability, change, administrative decision making, policy implementation and general organisation of public management systems. He is also interested in exploring the micro-foundations or micro-level practices that underlie the aforementioned areas of concern, for example, the social embeddedness of individuals and their involvement in administrative work, the shaping of individual identity, and more recently, the role of emotions in shaping human behaviour. Much of Shibaab's work is guided by institutionalist approaches, in particular the institutional logic framework where he seeks to build and elaborate on theory.
Shibaab also has expertise in public sector leadership and leadership education in general. His philosophy on leadership is mainly guided by a practice-view that draws attention to the work leaders do on a daily basis. This approach lends itself to understanding leadership through the eyes of those who enact leadership – the everyday public manager – and empowering them to understand that their work is indeed what leadership-in-action looks like. Shibaab is a firm believer that leadership is separated from any positional authority and everybody can in fact exercise leadership. Shibaab marries organisation theory perspectives with contemporary leadership approaches to understand how leadership is manifest as everyday practice.