The Importance of Psychological Safety in Team Development

Abstract

The concept of psychological safety was introduced over twenty years ago by Edmonson [1]. It entails the creation of a safe space where the individual members of a team can express their ideas and concerns in the workplace, knowing that they will be listened to and not judged. When Team Psychological Safety (TPS) is achieved, a sense of interpersonal trust is developed among the teammates, which leads to positive outcomes. The benefits that TPS brings to the overall team performance are such as reducing the fear of taking risks, increases the innovation potential of a team [2]. Therefore, it is important for a PMO to promote psychological safety as a way to seek the best performance of the team. Now, two main issues for the PMO arise i) how is TPS achieved and; ii) when does it emerge?

The first issue is explored by conducting a literature review with a view to understanding the nature of TPS, as well as the qualitative and quantitative assessments of the same. The latter is addressed by exploring Tuckman’s Model of Team Development. This model is widely recognized and referenced, where five stages are identified are: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. The present work analyzes the aforementioned stages of team development as function of the development of psychological safety [3]. The case, in which a newly created engineering team is formed, will address where and how TPS is sparked, as well as its role and evolution through the stages of team development. Lastly, new strategies will be proposed for leaders to promote the development of TPS in the early stages, creating a supportive work environment.

Introduction

To develop

• what is a perfect team and how can efficiency be achieved from a people perspective.
• relate the previous with Google's project Artistotle:

In 2012, Google engaged in the project Aristotle, whose goal was to find out what makes teams succeed. The devoted researchers analyzed hundreds of teams within the company and found that the ways of working and productivity levels were highly impacted by the group dynamics. Teams where people had the space to express themselves and showed mutual understanding while focusing on their tasks at hand made a competent team rather than the sum of competent individuals. They found that working psychologically safe setting was crucial for making a team work.

• Introduction to the concept of psychological safety

Psychological safety in teams

Benefits

'To develop'

• List and explain the benefits of psychological safety in team effectiveness
• Talk about the lack of psychological safety

Important idea "it sparks the kind of behaviour that leads to market breakthroughs"

How to create psychological safety [4]

• "Approach conflict as a collaborator, not an adversary"
• "Speak human to human"
• "Anticipate reactions and plan countermoves"
• "Replace blame with curiosity"
• "Ask for feedback on delivery"
• "Measure psychological safety"

Psychological safety is measured in a qualitative way. Periodic reviews.

Improving psychological safety

• Make the point of talking explicitly about psychological safety, making all employees aware.
• Propose specific measures to promote it

Tuckman's Model of Team Development and Psychological Safety

Overview of Tuckman's Model

In his team development model, professor Bruce Tuckman distinguishes between interpersonal relations among group members (group structure) and task activity in the different stages of team development. The core identified stages are forming, storming, norming and performing. After a revisit to the model, a fifth stage was added: adjourning. The following aspects were identified in natural group settings, where tasks were rather impersonal. This is usually the case with technical engineering tasks. The characteristics of each stage will be described taking an engineering team as an example.

• Forming: In this phase, the main roles are defined. The leadership role is given by the position, in this case, the project manager holds it. At this time, both the project manager and other team members have space for testing and understanding the team's boundaries. There is also room for exploring and scoping the task to determine how the team can approach it.

• Storming: This stage is characterized by the emotional response of the team members to conflict. Leadership problems arise, thus animosity among the engineers emerges and hierarchies are re-established. The storming phase has a lower relevance on intellectual and impersonal tasks, as it tends not to affect at a personal level.

• Norming: The team accepts each other and understands the differences between them, a common language between the team is found and interpersonal relationships grow. In the task activity domain, the team members openly express their opinion and evaluation of the developed work.

• Performing: In this phase, the team is characterized by its solid establishment. They have the ability to adopt their roles and perform the expected tasks as a competent team. Engineers are confident in performing their tasks while still relying on each other.

• Adjourning: missing info - still reviewing literature

The following figure relates team effectiveness vs time. It can be seen that the storming phase takes place at a rather early time and represents the lowest effectiveness of the team performance.

Analysis of the five stages of team development from a TPS point of view

A thorough analysis of psychological safety --> finding common points with team development stages

Discussion and limitations

The role of psychological safety in each stage of team development

• Talk about how implementing measures to ensure psychological safety can "dampen" the negative effects of the storming phase and impact team effectiveness.
• Ideally, hypothesize how the new graph of team development would look like

• Determine which stage of the team development it affects the most/ should be fostered. First guess: actions in the forming phase.

Limitations

• Try to find out how it works in the long term
• Define "time"
• What happens if the staff changes, does the whole process start again or old members are fixed with the previous tacit norms??

Conclusion

Comments for peergrade

• I am not sure if it would be more appropriate to change the title to "The Role of Psychological Safety in Team Development" or "The Influence of Psychological Safety in Team Development"
• I do not know if the structure that the article has now makes sense

Disclaimer The references are not correctly added because I did not manage to include them correctly

Cited works

[1] Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999 [2] Newman, Alexander, Ross Donohue, and Nathan Eva. "Psychological safety: A systematic review of the literature." Human resource management review 27.3 (2017): 521-535. [3] Tuckman, Bruce W., and Mary Ann C. Jensen. "Stages of small-group development revisited." Group & organization studies 2.4 (1977): 419-427. [4] Delizonna, Laura. "High-performing teams need psychological safety. Here’s how to create it." Harvard Business Review 8 (2017): 1-5.