Swedish antidiscrimination law in action – an e-mail conversation between a recruiter and a candidate

Based on a true story. If you are interested in learning more about the Swedish Discrimination Act (in Swedish), head over to my post evaluating a range of answers to requests based on Chapter 2 Section* as final assignment for an advanced university course in Swedish Labour Law.

*”If a job applicant has not been employed or selected for an employment interview, or if an employee has not been promoted or selected for education or training for promotion, the applicant shall, upon request, receive written information from the employer about the education, professional experience and other qualifications that the person had who was selected for the employment interview or who obtained the job or the place in education or training.”

https://www.do.se/other-languages/english/discrimination-act/#2

(Not) Getting away with buzzwords

How do you link complexity, innovation, diversity and creating effective teams without becoming to buzz-wordy? I’ve been attending two trainings, idenpendenly of each other. One in German, by the German Association of Psychologists called “Widerstände im Change-Prozess” (~Resistance in change processes) and one in Swedish by Psykologifabriken, Innovation360, Broryd Industrier och The Social Few called “Att leda i osäkerhet” (~ Leading in times of uncertainty). In this post, I’ll give it a try to combine the best of two worlds in one post – in English.

On cognitive dissonance and social identity – big bosses, talent for people and sapiens.

I only realised how excited I am about social psychology when I stumbled upon some well-known concepts and theories in a couple of books I’ve been reading lately. That made me reflect on what I actually know about social psychology and I even went back to my course books and materials to do a semi-propper fact check. This time it’s about how individuals create their identity, or their self-concepts, in relation to their employer and how cognitive dissonance may (or may not) account for certain behaviours. Identity has been central in for example Kajsa Asplund’s “Talang för människor” or a bit more subtle in Palm’s & Alsgren’s “The Big Boss” alongside cognitive dissonance which also plays a role in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Join me on a journey through three almost randomly selected books and what they can tell us about how psychological concepts are used in popular literature.

Objective champions & compassionate enthusiasts – Gendered wording in job ads

A larger Swedish consulting company recently claimed that “A simple change in recruitment ads significantly increased women applicants”. “Wow”, I thought, “that’s so 2017”. I remember the first wave of claims like this when I was working in the automotive industry 5 years ago. We had a job advertisement “scanner” as part of our diversity tool box – rumors had it that the scanner would highlight male words so that you could change them to something more female. Which in turn was supposed to make more women apply. Even today, some companies offer paid services on improving your ads, other tools are readily available online or you can just check out the original word list here.

I got exited about the claim by the Swedish consulting company – especially since they wrote in there press release that there were “a number of studies […] [showing that] the presence of masculine gendered words discourages women from applying to male-dominated roles, as they can make women feel they don’t belong in that work environment.” Maybe that actually was true. Maybe much has changed since 2017 and new research had been published to find a causal link between carefully gendered job ads and higher application numbers of female candidates. Spoiler alert – not much had changed.

Salemmordet ur ett social psykologiskt perspektiv

Salemmordet betecknar mordet på Daniel Wretström år 2000 som oftast liknas med startskottet för Salemmarschen, ” den största nazistiska manifestationen i Norden” (lyssna på P3 Dokumentär här). Inom ramen för mina psykologi studier fick jag analysera händelserna ur ett social psykologiskt perspektiv. Nedan delar jag med mig av min inlämningsuppgift.

Big 5 or Big 6?

This essay will describe and evaluate Lee and Ashton’s (2009) 60-item HEXACO-60, a personality inventory which is a shorter version of the 100-item HEXACO-PI-R and is derived from the Big Five personality taxonomy. Firstly, I will briefly describe the HEXACO-60 and reason why it fits best with the trait approaches of personality. After this, I will interweave theory and application by describing why this test has been developed within this theoretical approach. Finally, potential criticism from the two other theoretical developments, namely the humanistic-phenomenological and the psychoanalytic perspective, within personality psychology is accounted for.

Why “Due to the large number of applications, we are not able to provide individual feedback.” isn’t enough anymore

According to the Swedish Discrimintation Act (diskrimineringslagen 2 kap. 4 §) internal and external applicants have the right to receive written information on the qualifications of those candidates that have been invited to an interview or that have been selected for the position. Based on relevant literature and legal practice from the Swedish labour court, I analyse a couple of anonymised answers from employers which received a request based on DL 2 kap. 4 §. Replying to those requests can be a tricky undertaking if you don’t follow a competence-based and structured recruitment process. I elaborate on practical implications and provide suggestions on how to improve recruitment processes so that “DL 2 kap. 4 §”-requests don’t take you by surprise.

This essay is written in Swedish but automated translation to English usually works pretty okay. 

Learning & Development Resources

The list below is a collection of learning and development resources I have collected during the past two years. Feel free to recommend more resources or review existing ones in the comment section below.

Leadership in cross-cultural contexts (Part III)

Almost a year ago I have taken on my first formal leadership role as team lead. I have had experience from informal leadership roles (project leader, central function position) in cross-cultural contexts and some theoretical knowledge on cross-cultural management. Now I was curious about the concept of leadership in cross-cultural settings and enrolled in a university course on that topic. This is part three of a series of three posts (find part I here, part II here) describing my main learnings from the course.

Leadership in cross-cultural contexts (Part II)

Almost a year ago I have taken on my first formal leadership role as team lead. I have had experience from informal leadership roles (project leader, central function position) in cross-cultural contexts and some theoretical knowledge on cross-cultural management. Now I was curious about the concept of leadership in cross-cultural settings and enrolled in a university course on that topic. This is part two of a series of three posts (find part I here, part III here) describing my main learnings from the course.