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Anders Pousette

Senior Lecturer

Department of Psychology - Organisation, Health and Addiction
Telephone
+46 31-786 42 83
+46 766-18 42 83
Mail
anders.pousette@psy.gu.se
Visiting address
Haraldsgatan 1
41314 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 500
40530 Göteborg

About Anders Pousette

Biography

I studied to become a psychologist from 1983 to 1988 at the University of Gothenburg. During the 1990s, I worked as an organizational psychologist within Occupational Health Services and later in my own consulting practice, in parallel with doctoral studies at the Department of Psychology. In 2001, I defended my doctoral dissertation titled "Stress and Feedback in Human Service Organizations." Between 2000 and 2008, I conducted research at the National Institute for Working Life, primarily concerning work safety in the construction industry. After the closure of the institute, our research group moved to the Section for Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg. Since 2008, I have taught at the Department of Psychology at the University of Gothenburg, specializing in group and organizational psychology.

Teaching

I teach in the Psychology Program, where I am the course director for the course Group, Work, Organization 1, as well as for the module on Test Theory. I also participate in courses on work environment and recruitment in the Human Resource Program, and on patient safety culture in the Nursing Program. Starting in the autumn semester of 2026, I am the course director for the standalone course “Work and Organizational Psychology”.

Research interests

A recurring theme in my research has been organizational safety from a cultural and climate perspective. The safety theme has varied across different projects: occupational safety, patient safety, airport security, and information security. Most projects have involved leadership—leaders’ importance in the development of organizational climate, leaders’ own work environment, and contextual conditions that enable leaders to develop in their professional role. Most of my research has been quantitatively oriented, often using statistical methods to highlight the complexity of organizational life, such as multilevel analysis and structural equation modeling. 

Measurement of organizational phenomena has been a theme in several projects. For instance, I participated in a Nordic collaboration to develop a questionnaire for measuring safety climate in workplaces (NOSACQ-50).

In two interdisciplinary research programs (Security Culture and Information Technology, SECURIT (2012–2017) and Information Security Culture in Practice, ISKIP (2019–2023)), I contributed to advancing knowledge about information security from a cultural and climate perspective. In these programs, we developed a questionnaire for measuring information security climate in workplaces and carried out interventions aimed at strengthening the information security climate.

Another theme has been organizational values that regulate, among other things, corporate social responsibility and gender equality in workplaces. In the OVAL project, we compared such values across four industries in Sweden and India.

Several projects have been intervention studies addressing what is required to change and develop organizations and workplaces.

Current research

I am currently involved in two formally completed projects in which scientific reporting is still ongoing.

Hälsobygget- Intervention study for promoting good work environment in small companies within contractor chains in large construction projects.  In this project, we developed a workshop-based method to support small and medium-sized construction companies in strengthening their systematic work environment management.

GenderSafe. In this project, we examined what a gendered organizational climate entails, how it can be operationalized, and its relationship to gender discrimination and sexual harassment in organizations with different gender compositions. We also developed a tool that workplaces can use in their systematic work environment management.