Exploring supportive and defensive communication behavior and psychological safety between supervisors and their subordinates

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2015This project explores the relationship between supportive and defensive communication behavior and psychological safety in the organizational setting. A paper and pencil survey measuring team psychological safety and supportive and defensive communication behaviors was administered to participants in the northwestern region of the United States. Supervisor use of supportive communication behavior was hypothesized to be positively correlated with employee psychological safety. Support was found for the hypothesis. This research sought to expand the scope of our understanding of psychological safety in an organizational setting while highlighting the benefits of using supportive communication behavior

Behavioral integrity for safety, priority of safety, psychological safety, and patient safety: a team-level study

This article clarifies how leader behavioral integrity for safety helps solve follower's double bind between adhering to safety protocols and speaking up about mistakes against protocols. Path modeling of survey data in 54 nursing teams showed that head nurse behavioral integrity for safety positively relates to both team priority of safety and psychological safety. In turn, team priority of safety and team psychological safety were, respectively, negatively and positively related with the number of treatment errors that were reported to head nurses. We further demonstrated an interaction effect between team priority of safety and psychological safety on reported errors such that the relationship between team priority of safety and the number of errors was stronger for higher levels of team psychological safety. Finally, we showed that both team priority of safety and team psychological safety mediated the relationship between leader behavioral integrity for safety and reported treatment errors. These results suggest that although adhering to safety protocols and admitting mistakes against those protocols show opposite relations to reported treatment errors, both are important to improving patient safety and both are fostered by leaders who walk their safety talk

The Psychological Safety of Healthcare Professional Students in an Online Learning Environment

Psychological safety describes the perception of the consequence of interpersonal risk when interacting. Psychological safety is associated with improved engagement in learning behaviors in work groups and classrooms. However, little is known about the influence of psychological safety in the context of learner-learner interactions during health professional online learning. This qualitative single case study explored the influence of psychological safety on the learner-learner interactions of a cohort of occupational therapy students in an online class. Ten occupational therapy students and the instructor were interviewed about their experience of psychological safety when interacting with peers in an online class, and documents related to learner-learner interactions were collected. The resulting themes of this study described the feelings associated with different forms of interactions requiring psychological safety: being vulnerable, fear of being misunderstood, need to protect/protection, and group cohesion. Within these themes, this study described the contextual elements associated with online learning in healthcare professions and their impact on psychological safety during learner-learner interactions. Additionally, students reported interactional behaviors associated with psychological safety in online learning. Information from this study expands the knowledge of psychological safety in a new context and confirms the importance of psychological safety during high-stakes learner-learner interactions in an online environment. Information from this study could inform online learning instructors as to what signals psychological safety and suggests ways to build psychological safety into online learning courses

Psychological Safety in Agile Software Development Teams: Work Design Antecedents and Performance Consequences

Psychological safety has been postulated as a key factor for the success of agile software development teams, yet there is a lack of empirical studies investigating the role of psychological safety in this context. This study examines how work design characteristics of software development teams (autonomy, task interdependence and role clarity) influence psychological safety and further how psychological safety impacts team performance, either directly or indirectly through team reflexivity. We test our model using survey data from 236 team members in 43 software development teams in Norway. Our results show that autonomy boosts psychological safety in software teams and that psychological safety again has positive effect on team reflexivity and a direct effect on team performance

The presence and potential impact of psychological safety in the healthcare setting: an evidence synthesis

Introduction: Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Its presence improves innovation and error prevention. This evidence synthesis had 3 objectives: explore the current literature regarding psychological safety, identify methods used in its assessment and investigate for evidence of consequences of a psychologically safe environment. Methods: We searched multiple trial registries through December 2018. All studies addressing psychological safety within healthcare workers were included and reviewed for methodological limitations. A thematic analysis approach explored the presence of psychological safety. Content analysis was utilised to evaluate potential consequences. Results: We included 62 papers from 19 countries. The thematic analysis demonstrated high and low levels of psychological safety both at the individual level in study participants and across the studies themselves. There was heterogeneity in responses across all studies, limiting generalisable conclusions about the overall presence of psychological safety. A wide range of methods were used. Twenty-five used qualitative methodology, predominantly semi-structured interviews. Thirty quantitative or mixed method studies used surveys. Ten studies inferred that low psychological safety negatively impacted patient safety. Nine demonstrated a significant relationship between psychological safety and team outcomes. The thematic analysis allowed the development of concepts beyond the content of the original studies. This analytical process provided a wealth of information regarding facilitators and barriers to psychological safety and the development of a model demonstrating the influence of situational context. Discussion: This evidence synthesis highlights that whilst there is a positive and demonstrable presence of psychological safety within healthcare workers worldwide, there is room for improvement. The variability in methods used demonstrates scope to harmonise this. We draw attention to potential consequences of both high and low psychological safety. We provide novel information about the influence of situational context on an individual’s psychological safety and offer more detail about the facilitators and barriers to psychological safety than seen in previous reviews. There is a risk of participation bias - centres involved in safety research may be more aligned to these ideals. The data in this synthesis are useful for institutions looking to improve psychological safety by providing a framework from which modifiable factors can be identified

Psychological Safety: A Meta‐Analytic Review and Extension

Although psychological safety research has flourished in recent years, and despite the empirical support for the important role of psychological safety in the workplace, several critical questions remain. In order to address these questions, we aggregate theoretical and empirical works, and draw on 136 independent samples representing over 22,000 individuals and nearly 5,000 groups, to conduct a comprehensivemeta-analysis on the antecedents and outcomes of psychological safety. We not only present the nomological network of psychological safety but also extend this research in 4 important ways. First, we compare effect sizes to determine the relative effectiveness of antecedents to psychological safety. Second, we examine the extent to which psychological safety influences both task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors over and beyond related concepts such as positive leader relations and work engagement. Third, we examine whether research design characteristics and national culture alter validities within the nomological network, thus promoting a more accurate and contextualized understanding of psychological safety. Finally, we test the homology assumption by comparing the effect sizes of the antecedents and outcomes of psychological safety across individual and group levels of analysis. We conclude with a discussion of the areas in need of future examination

Social networks and psychological safety: A model of contagion

<p><strong>Purpose:</strong> We attempted to explain how the interactions between members influence the psychological safety of a team using social network analysis by proposing a model based on social contagion in which the psychological safety of the central node has a key role in the psychological safety of the whole team.</p> <p><strong>Design/methodology/approach:</strong> We present a theoretical paper which crosses theory about social network analysis, psychological safety and social contagion.</p> <p><strong>Findings and Originality/value:</strong> We suggest that there are two groups of variables that mediate this relationship. The first group concerns the characteristics of the node and is composed by the proximity to the node’s personal characteristics and the value of the central node as a source of information. Second, we advance that there are two dimensions at the level of tie properties that mediate the influence of a central node on team psychological safety – tie strength and friendship level. Finally, the interacting opportunities- a variable at context level - is considered to affect the strength of the ties.  We also advance some variables that mediate the influence of the psychological safety of a central node on the psychological safety of the team.</p> <p><strong>Originality/value:</strong> To the best of our knowledge there is no significant research using social network analysis to explain the process by which a team becomes psychologically safe. On the other hand, because psychological safety tends to be a team construct it is important to understand how team dynamics, evidenced by social network analysis, influence the formation of psychological safety through contagion processes.</p

Managing Tacit Knowledge Sharing: From Charismatic Leadership to Psychological Safety Climate

This study aims to examine the effect of charismatic leadership on the psychological safety climate and tacit knowledge sharing. This study also investigates the central role of psychological safety climate as a mediating variable between charismatic leadership and tacit knowledge sharing. This study adopted a simple random sampling method with 61 samples of employees from five of MSME companies in Banten. With the help of SmartPLS 3.0 software, the results of this study indicate that charismatic leadership has a significant direct influence on the psychological safety climate and tacit knowledge sharing. Likewise, the psychological safety climate has a significant direct effect on tacit knowledge sharing. This study also found evidence that charismatic leadership has a significant indirect effect on tacit knowledge sharing through mediating the psychological safety climate. Thus, the psychological safety climate acts as a partial mediator in this research model