Decades of research support the positive impact of psychological safety — the shared belief that people will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes — on team performance. However, this concept is often misunderstood, and there’s been a recent call from leaders for clarity around specific and actionable strategies to increase psychological safety.
To answer this call, the NeuroLeadership Institute completed a systematic review of the organizational and neuroscience research, entitled “The Neuroscience of Psychological Safety,” which explores what happens in the brain in the presence, or absence, of psychological safety. In this new journal article, we introduce specific behaviors that are likely to increase psychological safety and therefore performance.
Psychological safety is not ‘warm and fuzzy’
Psychological safety can be confusing — some people think it means being warm and fuzzy toward one another; others think it means working together without conflict and tension. In reality, psychological safety is anchored in high standards and low interpersonal threat. In this type of environment, you likely won’t see overly collegial andpolite behavior, but you will see people who:
- Speak clearly and directly to one another.
- Openly disagree about ideas.
- Acknowledge others for speaking up.
- Hold themselves and others accountable by admitting mistakes, coaching each other, and having difficult conversations.
In a psychologically safe environment, team members prioritize learning and gathering diverse perspectives. This leads to a team-level, rather than individual-level, focus for recognitions and rewards, facilitating high team performance.
Psychological safety optimizes team performance
Research makes it clear: Teams that have psychological safety outperform teams that don’t. Powerful findings from Amy Edmondson’s early psychological safety research show that the highest-performing nursing teams reported the most mistakes because they also had higher psychological safety, findings that have been replicated many times.
However, those high-performing teams didn’t actually make more mistakes. They were just more willing to talk about them because they were operating in a psychologically safe environment, even when stakes were high and people’s lives were on the line. The free and open communication is what led to learning and targeted solutions — and in the end, improved performance.
A more recent study among 62 innovation teams in the pharmaceutical sector supports these findings. In this study, there was a negative relationship between the diversity of a team or company’s expertise and how innovative that team or company was — meaning, as expertise diversity in a team increased, innovation performance was more likely to decrease.
This was somewhat surprising because it’s often thought that diverse teams outperform homogenous ones. However, when the researchers accounted for psychological safety, the relationship changed. Psychological safety made the diverse teams perform better, and they were far more likely to have innovation success. This study demonstrated, again, that psychological safety was the essential ingredient for high performance.
High performance standards without psychological safety can create an anxious and hypercompetitive environment that comes at the expense of interpersonal relationships and well-being at work. Therefore, to hold high performance standards while also supporting the well-being of their teams, leaders should create an environment of psychological safety. However, being direct, disagreeing, admitting mistakes, and maintaining accountability are tough, and if not intentionally encouraged, people would rather not practice these behaviors.
Neuroscience-based strategies for increasing psychological safety
Working with Edmondson, and using her research as our guide, NLI identified three habits of psychological safety: set the stage, invite participation, and respond thoughtfully. This research helped us pinpoint specific behaviors that psychologically safe teams are most likely to adopt.
Set the stage
Set the stage establishes clarity by creating a shared foundation for work and helping people understand they’re part of a group. When people have a shared in-group identity, they feel a sense of relatedness to one another. This relatedness provides a way to connect individual values with an overall purpose, helping people to create shared goals and motivating them to act in the best interest of the group. This includes setting expectations around speaking up, disagreeing, and admitting mistakes.
Invite participation
Invite participation is about increasing engagement by ensuring people speak up and are heard. In this context, it’s essential to address power dynamics because our perception of social status and potential threat can prevent us from sharing information. Leaders can mitigate these threats using tactics such as inviting participation from others before speaking up themselves.
Respond thoughtfully
Finally, we want to ensure people continue speaking up by rewarding desired behaviors through responding thoughtfully. Behavior is driven by reward: When reward pathways in the brain are stimulated, people are more likely to repeat a behavior. Therefore, when people are engaged in collaborative and creative work, it’s essential to reward them, even — or especially — when they disagree with or challenge us. And when behaviors need to be guided or reeled back in, it’s critical to do this without creating threat.
The latest NeuroLeadership Journal article, “The Neuroscience of Psychological Safety,” represents one of the three primary interrelated elements of modern leadership: growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability. Leaders who build habits around these three elements create a team culture where high performance is expected, rewarded, and recognized as a work in progress. To read the full article, “The Neuroscience of Psychological Safety,” click here to become an NLI Corporate Member.
