The Influence of Psychological Safety in Team Development

The concept of psychological safety was introduced over twenty years ago by Edmonson . 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 . 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 . 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

Large organizations like Google are constantly seeking for optimizing their processes and finding the most efficient way to success. In 2012, they engaged in the Project Aristotle, whose goal was to determine what makes a team succeed. The devoted researchers analyzed hundreds of teams within the company and found that, for analogous team structures and expertise, success levels were significantly different. There was no clear pattern to identify the characteristics of the perfect team. The quality of a team is defined by its direct performance and the working relationships both within the team and externally in the organization. Therefore, achieving goals and meeting expectations in an effective way is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a perfect team. Understanding the relationship between the individual members and their shared culture is key to strive for success.

The change of paradigm occurred when the lead researchers stumbled on the term “psychological safety”. It had been seen that group dynamics had a direct impact on the productivity levels of the teams. When people had the space to express themselves and shared a mutual understanding of the tasks, work was handled better. It became clear how important team leaders were to achieve this safe space. For example, a member of a high-performing team states that the leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks’’. Conversely, poor leadership and lack of emotional control led to lower performance.

The aforementioned concept of team psychological safety (TPS) refers to the commonly held conviction that there is a safe space for expressing ideas, voicing concerns, making mistakes and giving and receiving feedback without fear of being punished or judged. The term can be thought of as a matter of trust. Although interpersonal trust is an important aspect of psychological safety, the latter term goes above and incorporates the fact that people can be themselves. Members share a common understanding of the norms that define them as a whole rather than them as individuals.

The team leader (project manager) plays an important role in making their team a safe environment. The behaviour of the leader is usually noticeable by the team members and has a direct impact on their perception of psychological safety. When managers are open, supportive and constructive, the team is likely to be perceived as safe. However, when they are rigid, punishing and avoid examining errors, team members tend to avoid speaking up and suppress learning behaviours . As research shows, the term of TPS is not usually made explicit. However, team development models are more commonly referred to and looked into by PMs. This work provides an image on how can TPS positively influence team development.

Psychological safety in teams

Benefits

Hereunder, several benefits of team psychological safety are presented in terms of the value they bring to project managers .

Open communication

When members and leaders feel confident in expressing themselves without fearing punishment, they are more like to communicate openly. This lack of punishment makes team members admit their mistakes faster, giving the leader advantage to act sooner. Moreover, information and knowledge across the team are easily transmitted, which increases the situational awareness of the project manager and the rest of the team.

Learning behaviour

This perspective relates to the willingness of leveraging previous experience to face new challenges. Being able to fail, allows members individually and the team as a whole to take it as a growth opportunity. However, learning is not exclusive to past actions, seeking feedback and maintaining an open attitude towards new ideas is an important contributor to learning behaviours. Edmondson highlights the tight link between learning behaviours and psychological safety. A team leader that encourages learning behaviours will likely see direct results in the degree of safey achieved.

Increased innovation

Closely linked to the importance of encouraging learning, being able to take risks leads to higher innovation rates. Moreover, teams where psychological safety is a reality tend to have higher levels of critical thinking, which allows members to trust their judgement and identify opportunities. As it has been proved "It [psychological safety] sparks the kind of behaviour that leads to market breakthroughs" comprobar fuente.

Employee attitude

A cohesive and psychologically safe team usually leads to a positive attitude towards the team and the workplace. For managers, a positive employee attitude means a higher commitment and performance.

Improved performance

The main goal for project managers is to deliver results withing the established budget and timeframe ref?. Therefore, looking into how to improve performance and productivity is a common practice. TPS proves that when teams share a common understanding of the norms and tasks to perform, feel free to voice their ideas and collaborate, important discussions arise. These discussions enrich the development and delivery of the work. The aforementioned learning behaviour has also an indirect effect towards improving performance.

How to create psychological safety

As seen before, psychological safety is based on a set of shared beliefs and norms among team members. As team leader, the project manager plays a key role in facilitating the creation of this safe space. The project manager has the responsibility of leading by example, keeping open communication, owning mistakes and encouraging the team. Good leadership actions in this line would be :

• Creating a transparent culture: the project manager should try to engage in open communication. Sharing one's understanding of situations, thought processes, or decision-making directly impacts the development of the team's inherent norms, fostering an environment of open communication and reflection among team members.

• Replacing debate with dialogue: projects face risks and thus, are subject to unforeseeable events that can disrupt the project plan and resource allocation. These situations can lead to disputes and friction in the team. It is important for project managers to adopt a collaborative role rather than taking an adversarial approach. The end goal of the discussion is to reach a common agreement and find solutions.

• Promoting respect: recgonizing the skills and experience that team members bring to the project builds mutual respect. Regardless of the hierarchical structure, empathy and understanding should be shown to all members, acknowledging personal situations. Communication is, again, key to building trust and respect, sharing news early and keeping each other informed of project status and assumptions.

• Support the team: the project manager is available and an ally for problem-solving. In this, it is important to engage in active listening to understand the needs of the team and create learning opportunities.

• Acknowledge achievements: celebrating and recognizing the team's progress increases awareness of the real-time status of the project. It also helps in keeping the team motivated for achieving the end goals, to increase the engagement and sense of belonging.

Assessing psychological safety

While a team can establish the grounds for Psychological safety, it is an evolving aspect of team culture and as such needs to be measured and monitored periodically. TPS is assessed through reviews with the manager or surveys. During the reviewing process, the team members should not feel pressured into answering positively, transparency an open communication should lead. It is advised to use a neutral tone and allow room for discussions and opinions. Questions should be formulated in a clear manner, like "Do you feel that your contributions are valued within the team?", "How transparent do you feel the culture is?" , .

Application in new teams

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 a newly created engineering team as an example.

Five Stages of Team Development

• Forming: In this phase, the main roles are defined. The leadership role is given by the position, in this case, held by the project manager. 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: When the team has completed its purpose, the relationship terminates. The adjourning phase makes reference to the possible issues brought up by the separation.

The adjoining 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

The process of building a team determines its success to a big extent. Therefore, it is important to control the first development of the team. A thorough analysis of psychological safety --> finding common points with team development stages

Implementing psychological safety

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

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??
• How not to overlook authority

Annotated bibliography

• Occupational health and safety management - Psychological health and safety at work - Guides for managing psychological risks. DS/ISO 45003:2021