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 team members. The benefits that TPS brings to the overall team performance are such as reducing the fear of taking risks and increasing the innovation potential of a team . Therefore, it is important for a Project Management Office (PMO) to promote psychological safety as a way to seek the best performance of teams. 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 assessments of the same. The latter is addressed by exploring Tuckman’s Model of Team Development. This model is widely recognized and referenced in literature, where five stages are identified are: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. The present work analyzes the aforementioned stages as a function of the development of psychological safety . This study focuses on a newly created team and will address how TPS is sparked and its evolution along the stages of team development. Additionally, areas of related further research are identified and references to additional scientific studies are added. They have empirically demonstrated the effects of psychological safety on teams.

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 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). Achieving goals and meeting expectations 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.

A 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. When leaders are direct and clear, they create room for team members 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 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 of 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 likely 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 safety achieved.

• Increased innovation: is 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" .

• 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 within the established budget and timeframe . Searching for ways 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 a 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 ,:

Promoting 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

Recognizing 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 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 and 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

The creation of a new team presents a good opportunity to implement psychological safety, its influence in team development will be followed taking a newly created engineering team as an example. In this team, the management is centralized, where the project manager is accountable for the team formation and task delegation .

Implementing psychological safety

The project manager should introduce the concept to the team members, highlighting the benefits and motivation for the establishment of a psychologically safe space. Although TPS is sometimes an inherent belief, explicitly discussing it increases the awareness and understanding of the team. The expectations and desired outcomes of implementing psychological safety should be presented and discussed within the team. It is worth mentioning that achieving TPS is part of a process that requires willingness and patience on the part of the project manager and other team members .

Overview of Tuckman's Model

Figure 1. Five Stages of Team Development (Own creation, attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license)

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.

• 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. Currently, 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: The team is characterized by its solid establishment in this phase. 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: The relationship terminates when the team has completed its purpose. 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

Each stage of team development has an emotional and efficient component. The exploration of these stages through a psychological safety lens can provide an understanding and potentially affect the results of the team. The forming phase coincides with the early implementation of TPS. When the project manager introduces the concept, there is room for discussion and definition of boundaries. When the storming phase manifests, the group dynamics are heavily affected, if TPS is not in practice, conflict and friction between team members will arise. The norming phase is highly related to TPS, as group norms begin to appear and become stronger. Here, team members become more transparent about the tasks at hand. In performing the team has acquired the capabilities to trust each other and work effectively to meet the goals.

Discussion and limitations

The role of psychological safety in the team development stages

Figure 2. Psychological safety in team development (Own creation, Attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license )

One of the many benefits that TPS can bring to a team is increased productivity. By promoting TPS in new teams, their development can be shaped to strive for higher efficiency. Figure 1 showed that the forming and storming stages of team development delay the achievement of peak efficiency. It is thought that, by making psychological safety explicit, these peaks can be modulated to stabilize team performance levels.

The following graph shows an approximation of the effects of TPS with respect to the traditional team development model. Implementing psychological safety can facilitate the forming phase, as the safe space will be co-defined between the project manager and team members. The definition of roles and boundaries will scale trust and respect, the transparent environment will be built more quickly. Group dynamics are gradually formed and discussed explicitly, the group begins to function.

The main area of concern in team development is the storming phase, which has to be controlled as diligently as possible. However, having established TPS, rising tensions will not be approached as conflict, but as opportunities for collaboration and increasing learning behaviours. Not to deny the existence of conflicts in a TPS setting, but their emergence in a psychologically safe setting makes them less impactful to the overall performance. The group norms and culture of transparency make the individual members aware of others' ways of thinking and reasoning, which sets an important starting point for problem-solving. It is thought that the inescapable storming phase has a less detrimental effect on teams where psychological safety is introduced.

The norming phase of the team development model would correspond to a state in which psychological safety is adopted and mostly stabilized. However, It is important to consider that psychological safety is a process in itself and thus is not stable over time. This norming reconfigures the culture and group norms and makes the team solid for performing.

The role of the project manager

As seen before, the role of the project manager is determining in the achievement of psychological safety. In a centralized team setting, the project manager holds the authority and also acts as a mediator in conflict and facilitator of TPS. This article discussed about making psychological safety more explicit in teams, this can be extended to Project Management Offices. Introducing psychological safety in project management training modules will deploy its presence and engagement, providing future project manager with leadership skills that can be adapted to different contexts and human resources.

It is important for the project manager to take the time to identify their own motivation for establishing psychological safety, clarify the desired outcomes, and organize their thoughts before introducing the concept to the team. This preparation will help the project manager to communicate the concept in a clear and confident way. It is also relevant to highlight that psychological safety is not a one-time event, it is a process that requires time and commitment. The emergence of frictions may give the leader a sense of futility in regard to their actions. However, this shall not discourage them, opening up to the team and resorting for advice will not be seen as a weakness in a psychologically safe setting.

Limitations

The study proposes psychological safety as a mediating tool in team development. However, it does not explore its long-term effects. Considering that team development never ceases, teams go over the different phases continuously. Projects themselves face uncertainty and complexity at different levels, it may be difficult to prioritize psychological safety and team dynamics during high-stress periods.

Another issue found is how to impose authority without overriding psychological safety. This should not be a major issue, for TPS relies on a culture of transparency and the project manager should share the motivations of their decision-making. On their part, project managers should try to reflect on their choices, be open to suggestions and have clear arguments on how decisions are made.

It is easy to see the effects of psychological safety in Project Management. Projects are characterized by their temporary aspect, involving a finite amount of people within a company and having clear goals and deliverables. Programs and Portfolios manage a collection of components that affect a bigger share of the organization and spread over time . The question of how psychological safety should be assessed at Program and Portfolio levels arises. A more important question is if it is relevant to talk about psychological safety at this level. There should be trust, respect and transparency should exist among the managers of the different projects that conform Programs and Portfolios. Further research is needed to determine the relevance of explicitly discussing psychological safety at these levels.

Conclusion

Psychological safety can bring significant value to organizations, as it can help teams succeed while making team members feel valued and respected. This article has covered the concept of psychological safety and how project managers can implement it in their teams. Moreover, the importance of introducing psychological safety in newly created teams has been seen, as it modulates the negative changes in group dynamics. Actions in the line of educating project managers will widely contribute to creating psychologically safe spaces in the workplace.

Annotated bibliography

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

This standard provides an understanding of how psychological hazards can affect employee performance and wellbeing.

• ISO 10018:2020 Quality management: Guidance for people engagement

This standard highlights the importance of improving performance by increasing the involvement of people in the organizations.

• Project Management Institute, Inc. (PMI). (2021). A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK ® Guide) – 7th Edition and The Standard for Project Management - 2. Project Performance Domains. Project Management Institute, Inc. (PMI).

The second chapter of the PMBOK ® Guide covers the eight project performance domains in depth. Its reading makes it easier to understand the role of the project manager in the different domains, the team domain is particularly relevant for this study.

• Johnson, J. L., & O'Leary-Kelly, A. M. (2003). The effects of psychological safety and team efficacy on team performance. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 76(3), 315-330.

Suggests that teams where psychological safety is implemented perform better.

• O'Leary, D. F. (2016). Exploring the importance of team psychological safety in the development of two interprofessional teams. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 30:1, 29-34, DOI:10.3109/13561820.2015.1072142

Provides an understanding of TPS. It can be seen how psychological safety is developed and assessed in a real setting.

• Huang, C., & Jiang, P. (2012). Exploring the psychological safety of R&D teams: An empirical analysis in Taiwan. Journal of Management & Organization, 18(2), 175-192. doi:10.5172/jmo.2012.18.2.175

A thorough study of over 60 R&D teams in which psychological safety and its implications in analyzed.