User:Allyc8/Psychological safety

Lead
Original: Psychological safety is the ability to show and employ oneself without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status, or career (Kahn 1990, p. 708). It can be defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. -Copied from [Psychological safety]

Revised (for plagiarism): Psychological safety is the ability to share one’s thoughts and feelings without risk of damaging one’s reputation or standing. In teams, it refers to team members believing that they can take risks without being shamed by other team members.

Additions (to include new section):

-Copied from [Psychological Safety] benefits section, moved to lead to provide better overview of the article

Psychological safety benefits organizations and teams in many different ways. The following are the most widely empirically supported benefits of a team being psychologically safe:


 * 1) Improves likelihood that an attempted process innovation will be successful
 * 2) Increases amount members learn from mistakes
 * 3) Boosts employee engagement
 * 4) Improves team innovation

New: Most of the research on the effects of psychological safety has focused on benefits, but there are some drawbacks that have been studied. These include:


 * 1) Too much of a good thing can make positive effects eventually turn negative
 * 2) Mediator for unethical behavior
 * 3) Lowers motivation

Social Aspects
Research on team effectiveness emphasizes input-process-output (IPO) models -Copied from [Psychological safety] (Note: link to wikipedia article of Input-process-output model of teams)

Process innovation success
Multiple studies have shown businesses’ efforts in process innovation have had moderate to no success and have not improved firm performance. Psychological safety is shown to be an effective and important moderator of the relationship between process innovation and firm performance. This is due to cooperation being an important factor in process innovation. To have cooperation, it’s important to have an environment where people feel safe to share ideas.

Psychological safety is shown to have both direct and indirect effects on “manufacturing process innovation (MPI) performance.” It directly increases MPI performance as there is a greater likelihood of successful implementation of these process innovations when team members feel safe to speak up about problems and use everyone’s knowledge to help solve the problem. It also serves as a mediator as having established processes of sharing information increases psychological safety in teams which leads to MPI performance improvement

Learning from mistakes
In hospital units, members believing they will not be punished for reporting mistakes were correlated with higher rates of errors being detected. This illustrates a cycle in which members in units with psychological safety discuss errors more, which leads to other members being more willing to report errors in the future as there is less risk associated with reporting mistakes.

Employee engagement
A study surveying employees at a manufacturing company in China found that psychological safety did not directly affect employee engagement at work, but did affect it indirectly with employees voicing their thoughts as a mediator. When the perceived risks of speaking up are low, meaning psychological safety is high, employees feel more comfortable sharing their opinions which leads to more engagement in their work.

"Too-much-of-a-good-thing" effect
Much of the research on psychological safety has focused on the benefits it has for teams. However, research in management literature suggests that antecedents normally positively associated with desired outcomes eventually reach a point where the relationship turns negative. This is known as the "too-much-of-a-good-thing" (TMGT) effect. For example, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between conscientiousness and performance, meaning conscientiousness initially has a positive effect on performance, but too much leads to a decrease in performance. This suggest that negative outcomes could result if there is too much psychological safety.

Mediator for unethical behavior
One study examining these potential negative outcomes looked at the effects of utilitarianism on unethical behavior in teams with psychological safety has a mediator. The results showed that teams whose members are more utilitarian were more likely to engage in unethical behavior like cheating. This effect was even more pronounced in teams with higher levels of psychological safety.

Lowers motivation
More recent research highlights the negative effects of psychological safety on work motivation in group members and a further resulting negative effect on taking risks. Higher psychological safety was associated with lower motivation. Through the motivation mechanism, it led to group members being less likely to speak up about new ideas or voice any concerns and also less likely to learn and improve on their processes.

Increasing Psychological Safety in Teams
- Note: Add new section to accurately reflect content already in Benefits section