What is psychological safety?
The term “psychological safety” was first introduced by Harvard’s Amy Edmondson in 1999 as the absence of interpersonal fear, where people feel safe to speak up with work-relevant content. She explored its relationship to team learning and performance.
Global competition has a growing tendency; therefore, companies expect high performance from their employees and to contribute to the improvement of organisational processes and practices continuously. But as we all know, change- and improvement-oriented attitudes involve a certain degree of personal risks for employees, as they need to express new ideas, collaborate with others, go even against their supervisors’ opinion and be innovative and creative. Moreover, as experimenting with new ideas might not always lead to successful outcomes, employees also need to face the risk of failure. Therefore, employees might inhibit valuable knowledge and ideas to protect themselves from failure.
However, besides other recent studies, Google identified psychological safety as the number one characteristic of successful, high-performing teams.
Let’s see what this term is about and how to integrate it into your leadership style.
What are the effects of psychological safety?
First, it is important to mention that psychological safety can be measured on multiple levels, like individual, team and organisational levels. A psychologically safe environment is one that individuals and the team itself perceive as one. The emphasis is on establishing those interpersonal behaviours and attitudes that lead to perceived safety. This demands high soft skills from leaders.
As mentioned before, psychological safety is indirectly linked to high-performing, successful teams and individuals as employees will feel safe in interpersonally risky behaviours like voicing ideas, providing and getting honest feedback, collaborating, taking risks, experimenting, managing conflicts, sharing their opinion and being creative. That, in turn, leads to better individual and organisational learning and performance.
Psychological safety has scientifically proven positive effects on:
Communication and sharing voice behaviour
Feeling safe to share ideas, knowledge, and opinions also leads to a greater tendency to openly report errors, fears and problems.
For this, companies must build a culture of failure – a set of shared values, goals and practices that encourage learning through experimentation. Share on XThanks to this, challenges and problems will be seen as opportunities to grow and learn rather than threats to personal success and status.
Above this, there will be a more significant knowledge-sharing behaviour among team members, positively impacting knowledge transition and individual and team performance.
Learning
The possibility to learn from challenges evolves when we feel safe to talk about errors, problems and failures.
Leaders must see the potential in identifying and solving problems with their teams and encourage individuals to be honest about them.
If so, they implicitly suggest to their employees that problems are normal, and by supporting them in overcoming those obstacles, individuals develop self-efficacy and self-trust.
Performance, creativity & innovation
Psychological safety leads to more creative and innovative teams, as ideas, know-how and information are shared and discussed with each other. Above this, playful interactions can help to overcome the obstacles of creative thinking.
Individual attitude
Employees tend to be more committed to organisational goals and to show positive attitudes towards teamwork when they perceive their environment as psychologically safe. Therefore, they will be more likely to engage in relevant work behaviours such as information, idea and opinion sharing.
What if there’s no safety granted?
Business environments expect high performance, change, creativity and collaboration. As these demand risky behaviours, employees need to feel safe about failures.
If employees need to perform well in a blame business culture, they will choose to go the less risky way whenever they need to solve a problem or make a decision. The personal interest in keeping a positive image (and their job) will be of higher importance than company or team success.
As a result, teams won’t challenge the status quo, preventing the company from innovation and creativity.
Another negative outcome is the risk of increasing mental health issues. Talking about concerns and being open about problems is a crucial self-regulation process in stressful situations. It helps your team and individuals to deal with pressure and uncertainty.
Above this, sticking to the status quo might reduce perceived self-efficacy and motivation.
8 Tips on how to establish psychological safety as a leader
1: Focus on a people-oriented business culture
Studies show that leader inclusiveness, support, trustworthiness, openness and behavioural integrity strongly influence employee perceptions of psychological safety.
Therefore, a people-oriented culture is considered to be more effective in the means of psychological safety than a task-oriented culture. Furthermore, people-oriented leadership focuses on creating overall success by building lasting relationships with employees and creating an authentic business culture.
2: Use dyadic instead of group-based discovery methods
Organisation development methods mainly rely on group interventions. However, team conflicts and low-performance issues are also related to individual perceptions and attributions.
Individuals’ overall self-concept, belief system and motivation significantly impact group dynamics. Therefore, in order to discover certain limitations or even strengths, leaders should create a safe environment for discovery and reflection in person with each team member.
A leader will be better able to motivate, teach and lead when given greater knowledge of individuals’ mood, motivation, self-efficacy, goals, trust of members and the team and perception of situations.
Above this, criticism should be addressed personally so that the given employee’s integrity won’t be hurt.
3: Discuss the term and expectations with your team
Discuss with your team the importance of psychological safety and the possible positive and negative outcomes. Ask them what they perceive as a safe environment and let them express what they expect from you as a leader in order to feel valued and safe. They may welcome group and/or one-on-one coaching sessions with you or a dedicated room for group interventions and conversations.
As a leader, you will be the role model for creating a psychologically safe environment: give help when asked and ask for help when needed.
4: Educate your team on the possible threats to safety
In my experience, stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination seriously threaten psychological safety. As these attitudes often unconsciously influence our behaviour, education might foster self-reflection and change.
Teaching your team that forming stereotypes is a natural process of our brain to organise information will lead to self-acceptance so that individuals can be more honest about their own stereotypes and prejudices. Besides this, demonstrating modern and ambivalent discrimination (sexism, racism, ageism, etc.) through real-life examples increases sensitivity and awareness.
5: Set norms through an ethical codex
Sometimes group interactions can violate individuals’ integrity and perceived psychological safety, especially when it comes to conflicts. Therefore, it is suggested to establish some ethical codex or norm that should be provided to all members in written form.
6: Reframe failure and let go of blame-games
Failure is mainly perceived as something bad: a great threat to the company and the individual at once.
Help your team reframe the mental concept of failure and establish a new point of view, where challenges can be perceived as opportunities if you keep being honest about it. Share on XEliminate blame games and punishments. Instead, build a business culture where failure is accepted, and honesty is valued.
7: Use conflicts as a tool for growth
Whenever a conflict evolves: try to endure the situation in order to allow individuals or teams to grow. If you can emotionally detach yourself from the conflict, you will be able to let it peak and intuitively know when to intervene and how to resolve it.
8: Note that there are cultural differences in perceived safety and behaviour
Like most western cultures, individualistic cultures show low levels of collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.
Hence, employees from cultures with a higher level of collectivism might prefer to refrain from speaking out or experimenting with new ideas, as they feel like risking being excluded by other group members.
Summing up
As a leader, you should grant psychological safety to teams and individuals to reach high performance and innovation. This means that employees should feel safe to
- express thoughts and opinions;
- present ideas;
- participate in group work;
- make mistakes;
- be themselves;
- manage conflicts;
- ask for help;
- talk about problems, limitations and fears;
- be honest about failure, mental health and issues.
However, psychological safety evolves on individual and team levels as well. Therefore, leaders should model behaviour that leads to perceived safety and inclusion and give space for group and personal discussions and feedback.
