Cultivating Psychological Safety_EXTERNAL.pdf

Cultivating Psychological Safety

1. Public
April 2023
SAP SuccessFactors Growth &InsightsTeam
CultivatingPsychological
Safety

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What is Psychological Safety?
•Psychological safety was first conceptualized by MIT professors Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis in 1965.
•Psychological safety is a person's or group's perception of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks at work (Edmondson & Lei, 2014).
•It is the "feeling of being able to employ oneself without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career" (Kahn, 1999).
Why is it important?
•Psychological safety enables individual, team, and organizationallearning, performance, and engagement by mitigating risk in work
environments.
•When risk is eliminated, people are more likely to speak up (voice), take the initiative, admit mistakes, learn from failure, and exchange
ideas freely without experiencing potential consequences.
•When groups experience psychological safety, they exchange information freely, integrate perspectives, and charitably collaborate,
enabling learning.
•Suggestions for improvement, proposals, and ideas are evaluated for substantive merit and practicality; innovation ensues.
•Psychological safety is especially important to knowledge work where teamwork, integration of perspectives, sharing of information and
ideas, and collaboration toward shared goals creates a competitive advantage (Edmondson & Lei, 2014).
How can we cultivate it? Our content analysis of 97 best practices shows that everyone has a role to play.
•Senior leaders: (1) Make psychological safety a strategic priority, (2) invest in leadership development, and (3) measure and create outlets
for facilitating psychological safety.
•People managers: (1) Nourish team curiosity and solicit feedback directly, (2) cultivate meaningful team relationships (3) reduce your
team’s uncertainty, and (4) celebrate wins and learn from losses.
•Individual contributors: (1) Embrace curiosity and demonstrate engagement, (2) are respectfully critical, (3) build your credibility, and (4)
provide plausible alternatives to challenges.
Executive summary

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Group perceptions of psychological safety are different from individual feelings. Just because an organization or team
perceives psychological safety at the aggregate level does not imply each individual experiences it. There may be pockets
of people who do not experience psychological safety to the same extent as their team or organization.
Psychological safety is not just about feeling able to voice one’s ideas, suggestions, or improvements freely. An equally
important element is that people are willing to admit mistakes. Teams will gain the benefits of psychological safety only
when they freely admit mistakes to each other. Only then can teams engage in the knowledge exchange process to learn
from mistakes, synthesize innovative processes, and prevent future errors.
Organizations will look to managers to be the conduits to foster it within their teams, but executives must set the strategic
priority and embed psychological safety as a cultural value. Individual contributors must also embrace curiosity, be critical,
and be active in providing suggestions and feedback.
Silence is the default state in organizations, and leaders must recognize that no news is not necessarily good news.
Cultivating psychological safety will help leaders gain a true sense of how their organization is performing and how much
their strategic direction and leadership is endorsed by their workforce.
Psychological safety is paramount to reaping the benefits of diversity and distributive expertise. If people do not feel
comfortable expressing themselves, their unique perspectives are less likely to be expressed and, consequently, will only
add marginal value.
Psychological safety key considerations
Group and
individual
attitudes
Admitting
mistakes
Everyone has a
role to play
Silence
tendency
Benefits of
diversity and
expertise

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Methodology
•Reviewed 62articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals (1986 –2021) and 13popular business
press articles (2017 –2022) on psychological safety and employee voice to inform our perspective of the topic.
•Conducted a qualitative thematic analysis on best practice recommendations for cultivating psychological
safety for employees, managers, and senior executives.
Topics of Investigation
•What is psychological safety, and how is it critical to organizational success?
•What is an effective maturity model for understanding the stages of psychological safety development?
•How can we cultivate psychological safety at work? What is the role of HR and HR technology?
•What are the implications for existing/in-progress HR research programs?
Research program overview

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Netflix documentary: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
•In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 Max airliners crashed, resulting in the
deaths of 346 people.
•Investigations pointed to a fault in the MCAS design that was critical to
stabilizing the airliners.
•Even though the design went through internal quality control checks and
governmental auditing and regulation, the flaw made its way to the
market.
•The documentary pointed to two underlying cultural reasons why the
MCAS system's design flaw was not resolved and created the
catastrophe at Boeing.
•Hyper-focus on bottom line business results at the cost of
design safety
•Suppression of psychological safety
Boeing case study

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Boeing case study
“It used to be a culture of mutual trust… I
really loved working there because I had a
say. When something wasn’t right, I could
bring it up and wasn’t afraid of being fired.”
–Boeing engineer
“It used to be when you raise your hand and say, ‘we have a problem
here,’ they would say, ‘you’re right, we need to fix it.’
Boeing quit listening to their employees. So every time I would raise my
hand, they would attack the messenger and ignore the message.”
–Boeing quality manager
“My pay was docked for putting quality concerns in
writing. They told us flat out that they didn’t want
anything in writing so they could maintain culpable
deniability.”
–Boeing quality manager
“Historically, Boeing has a culture of telling bad news and
discussing concerns freely when building plans. Now it became a
problem of ‘do not bring bad news to the boss.’’’
–WSJ reporter
“Anyone who reporteda problem was either fired, let go, or moved on.”
–Boeing whistleblowers
Quotes from Netflix documentary: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing

7. INTERNAL –SAP and Customers only
“A lack of psychological safety at work has major business repercussions.” –Center for Creative
Leadership
“If you create a sense of psychological safety on your own team… you can expect to see higher levels of
engagement, increased motivation, more learning, and better performance.” –Laura Delizonnain HBR
“Organizations that foster psychological safety benefit because it promotes teamwork, encourages
authenticity, fosters learning and innovation, and drives business outcomes.” –Gartner
“When employees feel comfortable asking for help, sharing suggestions informally, or challenging the
status quo without fear of negative social consequences, organizations are more likely to innovate
quickly, unlock the benefits of diversity, and adapt well to change.” –McKinsey & Company
“Of the five key dynamics of effective teams that researchers identified, psychological safety was by far
the most important.” –re:Workwith Google
Public

8. What is psychological safety?

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“Psychological safety describes people’s
perceptions of the consequences of taking
interpersonal risks in the workplace.”
“It is the ‘feeling of being able to show and
employ oneself without fear of negative
consequences to self-image, status, or career.’”
Amy C. Edmondson
Professor
Harvard Business School
William A. Kahn
Professor
Boston University
Psychological safety definition

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Prototypical highpsychological safety Prototypical lowpsychological safety
•Share ideas freely without fear of
repercussions
•Focuses only on the “good news”
•Provides feedback to improve processes•Masks or ignores issues
•Voices differing opinions from the group
•Is reluctant to speak up for fear of
retaliation or shame
•Calls attention to issues that need to be
addressed
•Sweeps issues “under the rug”
•Brings one’s authentic whole-self to work •Masks one’s true self and attempts to
manage the impressions of others
Psychological safety indicators

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Psychological safety multi-level framework
Team Psychological Safety
Individual Psychological Safety
and Employee Voice
Creativity
Psych safety
Organizational Psychological Safety
TrustProactive behavior
Personality
Confidence
Employee voice
Motivators Inhibitors
Failure learning
Org. commitment
Engagement
Knowledge exchange
Organizational learning
Organizational performance
Knowledge
exchange
Commitment-based HR practices
Psych safety
(Climate of trust and initiative)
Process innovation
High-quality relationships & social
capital
Characteristics
Diversity
Leadership
Learning Decision quality
Task conflict &
problem-solving
Social interaction
Performance
Effort & problem solving
Knowledge
exchange
Psych safety
Trust
Leadership
Work design
HXM
1. Edmondson & Lei, 2014

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Individualpsychological safety & employee voice
•Leadership factors including trust in leadership,
transformational leadership styles, and positive LMX facilitate
psychological safety.
•Personality factors includingproactive personality and behavior,
emotional stability, openness to experience, and learning
orientation predict psychological safety perceptions.
•Work design factors includingjob autonomy, supportive task
interdependence, and role clarity are predictive of psychological
safety.
•Psychological safety predicting voice behaviors will depend on
confidencein one’s knowledge.
•Trustin one’s group is an important predictor of employee voice
behaviors.
Creativity
Psych safety
TrustProactive behavior
Personality
Confidence
Employee voice
Motivators Inhibitors
Failure learning
Org. commitment
Engagement
Knowledge exchange
Leadership
Work design
•Employee voiceis the discretionary communication by an
employee of ideas, suggestions, concerns, or opinions about
work-related issues.
•A mental cost-benefit analysis occurs when deciding to voice
or remain silent. It is an analysis between driving forces that
motivatevoice and the inhibitingforces that discourage it.
•Employees will engage in voice onlywhen the motivators are
stronger than the inhibitors.
•Outcomes: High employee voice is associated with positive
employee outcomes like on-the-job creativity, employee
engagement, knowledge exchange between peers, learning from
failures, and organizational commitment.

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Motivatorsand inhibitorsof employee voice
Motivators Inhibitors
Personality
factors
Job attitudes
and beliefs
Emotions and
beliefs
Leader
behavior
Contextual
factors
Willits & Franco-Watkins, 2021
•Extraversion
•Conscientiousness
•Assertiveness
•Duty-orientation
•Self-efficacy
•Org. identification
•Satisfaction
•Control/influence
•Org. support
•Loyalty/attachment
•Psych. empowerment
•Org. self-esteem
•Cognitive engagement
•Anger
•Positive affect
•Affect-based motives
•Norm-based motives
•Leader-member exchange
•Transformational leadership
•Ethical leadership
•Authentic leadership
•Justice climate
•Group voice climate
•Caring climate
•Ethical climate
•Formal voice mechanisms
•Anger
•Fear
•Internalized beliefs about riskiness of voice
•Anticipated regret
•Negative mood
•Achievement orientation
•Shyness
•Job and social stressors
•Instrumental climate
•Climate of fear/silence
•Hierarchical leadership
•Change-resistant
culture

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Teampsychological safety
Characteristics
Diversity
Leadership
Decision quality
Task conflict &
problem-solving
Social interaction
Performance
Effort & problem solving
Knowledge
exchange
Psych safety
Trust
Learning
•Team characteristics,includingsupportive teams, team
structures, and team autonomy, facilitate psychological safety.
•Psychological safety is one of the keys to unlocking the benefits
of diversity. It moderates team diversity and learning, and
performance.
•Leadershipstyles (for example, servant, transformational),
including aspects of relationship-based leadership, are predictive
of psychological safety.
•Social interaction within teams facilitates psychological safety
by reducing interpersonal uncertainty through cultivating positive
relationships.
•Conflict and problem solvingor the ability to openly
communicate through experimentation, discussion, and decision-
making creates psychological safety.
•Performance of the group stems from psychological safety and
is enabled through team member’s exchange of knowledge and
learning.
•Trust allows teams to discuss errors and learn from their
mistakes, which drives effort, problem-solving, and performance.
Trust directs effort and informs problem-solving while leading to
performance.
•Psychological safety allows for learningof many types, including
knowledge acquisition, admitting and learning from failure,
and adapting to change in new processes, which drives team
decision quality.
•Knowledge exchange allows for divergent thinking, creativity,
and risk-taking and stems from psychological safety, enabling
learning.

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Organizationalpsychological safety
Organizational learning
Organizational performance
Knowledge
exchange
Commitment-based HR practices
Psych safety
(Climate of trust and initiative)
Process innovation
High-quality relationships & social
capital
HXM
•Commitment-based HR practicesare HR practices that
emphasize high-investment in employer-employee relationships.
They motivate employees and provide the flexibility needed in
dynamic work environments, leading to psychological safety.
•Conceptually aligned to the HXM vision.
•High-quality relationships & social capitalare correlated with
psychological safety and are comprised of having a strong
emotional, mutual connection.
•Process innovation is related to organizational performance, but
only when the organization exhibits high levels of psychological
safety.
•Organizational learning: Positive subjective experiences and
positive social relationships among employees are predictive of
learning behaviors in organizations.
•Organizational performance is predicted by the key mediating
mechanism of psychological safety. Distal factors of commitment-
based HR practices, social capital, and process innovation are
most effective in driving performance when psychological safety
is present.
•Knowledge exchange is a key mechanism that drives
performance. Psychological safety leads to knowledge exchange,
which in turn drives organizational performance.

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Psychological safetyis a condition in which you feel (1) included, (2) safe to learn, (3)
safe to contribute, and (4) safe to challenge the status quo without fear of being
embarrassed, marginalized, or punished.
1.Inclusion safety: is informal admittance to the team. The members of the social
collective accept you and grant you a shared identity. It is provided by genuinely
inviting others into your societybased on the sole qualification that they possess. It is
created and sustained through renewed admittance to the group and repeated
indications of acceptance.
2.Learner safety: indicates that you feel safe to engage in the discovery process, ask
questions, experiment, and even make mistakes –not if, but when, you make them.
Without this, you will likely remain passive due to the risk of acting beyond a tacit line
of permission.
3.Contributor safety:is the stage where the individual is invited to participate as an
active and full-fledged member of the team. It is an invite and an expectation to
perform work in an assigned role with appropriate boundaries, on the assumption
that you can perform competently in your role. If you don’t offend the social norms of
the team, you’re normally granted contributor safety when you gain competency in
the required skills and assigned tasks. Contributor safety emerges when the
individual performs well, but the leader of the team must do their part to provide
encouragement and appropriate autonomy.
4.Challenger safety: is the license to innovate. It allows you to challenge the status
quo without retribution, reprisal, or risk of damaging your personal or standing
reputation. Armed with challenger safety, individuals overcome the pressure to
conform and can enlist themselves in the creative process. It is the leader’s job to
manage the tension and draw out the collective genius of people and then sustain
that recursive process through trial and error.
Psychological safety maturity –Timothy R. Clark’s Model
Fear is a barrier to team innovation and is a sign of weak leadership. It should be
the job of leaders to remove interpersonal fear in teams to foster innovation.
Premises: (1) Human beings want to be included, (2) they want to learn, (3) they
want to contribute, and (4) they want to challenge the status quo when they believe
things need to change.

17. How can we cultivate psychological
safety at work?

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Silence tendency
•Many employees are hesitant to engage in voice when the recipient
may view the information as negative or threatening.
•There is an apprehension in communicating unwanted news upwardly
due to the fear of an adverse reaction.
•“Well-meaning leaders unintentionally reinforce an authority-ranking social
frame so pervasive and fundamental that most employees enter
organizations expecting to 'tread lightly' around those in power." (Tourish&
Robson, 2006).
•Silence is the default state in organizations.
Leadership blind-spots
•As a result, leaders may have a (1) distorted sense of how their
organization is performing and (2) distorted sense about the level of
support for their decisions and practice.
•“Leaders often fail to see the issues and problems that employees see and
may assume ‘no news is good news’” (Ashford et al., 2009).
•Leaders must actively cultivate psychological safety to combat the
tendency for silence.
Face the silence tendency

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Methodology
•We conducted a search of recently published academic (1986 –2022) and business press
(2017 –2022) articles that outline best practices for cultivating psychological safety and
identified 15 articles.
•We reviewed the sources and extracted the data to derive a list of 97 best practices.
•A within-level qualitative thematic analysis was conducted to group best practices by theme and
audience (for example, senior leaders, frontline managers, individual contributors).
Results
•18 best practices for senior leaders grouped into 3 themes.
•54 best practices for managers grouped into 4 themes.
•14 best practices for individual contributors grouped into 4 themes.
•Results indicate a heavy focus on managers as the conduits to foster psychological safety.
Content analysis of best practices

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1.Make psychological safety a strategic priority(44.4%): silence is the default in many organizations. Senior leaders must face the silence
tendency head-on –no news does not equal good news. Senior leaders must be explicit about the importance of psychological safety and make
cultivating it a strategic priority that aligns with cultural values and operating norms, and connects to important business outcomes (for example,
innovation).
i.Make the shift from focusing on lagging business results to concentrating on the leading indicators that bring about organizational success.
ii.Champion employee listening, be receptive to all internally raised concerns, and showcase the importance of psychological safetyby
incorporating the concept in internal communications, talk tracks, and forums.
iii.Be appreciative of challenging, innovative, and risky ideas, even if they are not realistic or feasible.
iv.Model fallibility, be transparent with wins and losses and encourage learning from losses.
2.Invest in leadership development (37.5%): invest in leadership development for managers so they can cultivate psychological safety within their
teams. Demonstrate the importance of people-centric management to foster psychological safety, and how it is directly tied to their team’s success.
i.Provide managers with the learning resources to implementbest practices intheir teams and reinforce learning over time.
ii.Give managers “incubation forums” with their peers to discuss best practices and think through challenges they are experiencing with their
teams.
iii.Equip managers with digital tools to effectively embedpsychological safety in their teams (for example, nudges for 1:1 team member check-
ins, psychological safety micro-learning accessible in the flow of work).
3.Measure and create channel for facilitating psychological safety (22.2%): adopt a data-driven structured approach to cultivating psychological
safety.
i.Periodically measure team perceptions of psychological safety and monitorprogress with employee pulse surveys.
ii.Create an anonymous channel as an option for employees to provide feedback.
iii.Once feedback is solicited, make sure it is acted upon, even if that means just explaining why suggestions may not be feasible.
Best practices for senior leaders
* % indicate percentage out of total best practices extracted at
each level

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1.Nourish team curiosity and solicit feedback regularly (50%): be the champion for free thought in the team.
i.Challenge team members to be asking themselves, “Are we doing these things because it’s the way we have ‘always done them’ orisit because it's the
most effective way to do them?”
ii.Create space for new ideas in team meetings, ensure an inclusive environment to facilitate voice, and encourage questions, doubts, and sharing of
concerns.
iii.Acknowledge team members' contributions that are innovative or different from the status quo.
iv.Solicit feedback on team processes and dynamics in groupand 1:1 settings, and try to be receptive to all respectful criticism.
2.Cultivate meaningful team relationships (22.2%): acknowledge that all team members have unique experiences and take the time to learn about their whole
selves.
i.Recognize that those team members who are comfortable, know each others’ tendencies, and understand each others’ backgrounds tend to engage in
productive conflict towards shared goals.
ii.Take the time to share stories about life outside of work, create occasions for fellowship that are intentionally non-work related, and encourage team
members to bring their whole selves to work.
3.Reduce team uncertainty (14.8%): state the goals and priorities for the team explicitly (for example, a psychologically safe team environment) and with
conviction, even if team members mightalready know them.
i.Clearly articulate how the team contributes to organizational goals, the purpose behind team goals, and the rationale behind important decisions.
ii.Ensure communication with team members is consistent in both cadence and prioritization of psychological safety.
iii.Clarify team members' roles and how their roles contribute to the team's goal. Make it clear that all team members are asked (expected) to voice their ideas
and challenge decisions or others’ ideas. This applies to all team members, from interns to team leads.
4.Celebrate wins and learn from losses (13.0%): celebrate team victories and have after-action discussions on contributing factors to losses.
i.Identify and seek to replicate the cultural factors that contributed to team wins, such as psychological safety.
ii.Acknowledge losses and discuss as a teamwhy those opportunities were missed with the intent of determining the factors that contributed to the failure
and moving forward by learning from them. As a manager, be a role model in this process by sharing one’s own failures, errors, or mistakes.
Best practices for managers
* % indicate percentage out of total best practices extracted at
each level

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1.Embrace curiosity and demonstrate engagement (35.7%): embrace the mindset that you can learn from everyone and recognize that people
around you have unique experiences.
i.Ask team members questions with the intent of learning from them.
ii.Overcome the apprehension of asking questions when you do not understand a term, concept, or the logic behind decisions.
iii.Be active in meetings and contribute your honest thoughts, even if they deviate from what others have said.
2.Be respectfully critical (28.6%): be willing to speak up, challenge the status quo, or suggest wild ideas, but do so with respect and inclusion of
those around you.
i.Frame criticism in a way that will be less threatening to the audience.
ii.Approach disagreements as a collaborator working towards shared goals rather than as an opponent.
iii.Understand that people have unique experiences different from yours and embrace the fact that their ideas may have merit –ideasare rarely
entirely brilliant or deficient.
3.Build your credibility (21.4%): research demonstrates that those who are perceived as credible tend to have their suggestions better received by
others.
i.Find ways to build your credibility and know that it will build as you learn more about how your team functions and how it contributes to the
organization's goals.
ii.Deliver on promises to build your trustworthiness and learn as much as possible from others to develop your expertise. Over timeyour
suggestions will carry more weight.
4.Provide plausible alternatives (14.3%): research demonstrates that criticism is better received when accompanied by a potential solution to
address the problem.
i.Anticipate the objections of others to your criticism and address their concerns head-on. If you do not know, tell them.
Best practices for employees
* % indicate percentage out of total best practices extracted at
each level

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•Organizations must recognize the importance of psychological safety, realize that it will be a process to cultivate it within
the enterprise, and be intentional in commissioning HR to create and execute a strategy to foster psychological safety.
HR must be the internal champion of psychological safety to senior leaders and the lines of business.
•It is the role of HR to specify the strategy to cultivate psychological safety within their organization, including how to
measure, monitor and create channels for psychological safety, and be the knowledge and best practice center for
enabling managers to foster psychological safety within their teams.
•Strategy:specify the strategy for embedding psychological safety at organization, team, and individual levels, complete
with a business case for allocating time, attention, and resources to fostering psychological safety, objectives, activities
to be undertaken, milestones, and KPIs.
•Measurement, monitoring, channels:develop a data-driven system to anonymously measure and monitor
psychological safety and create channels for employees to safely voice their ideas, feedback, and mistakes.
•Manager enablement: equip managers with the knowledge, skills, and motivation to foster psychological safety within
their teams and designate internal roles with expertise on the topic to serve as consultants to help teams create and
sustain practices and norms that facilitate psychological safety.
The role of HR

24. What is the relationship between
psychological safety and HR technology?

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Some HR technology requires users
to have psychological safety to be
fully effective
HR technology can be leveraged to
facilitate interventions to improve
psychological safety
HR technology can be leveraged to
measure and diagnose
psychological safety, and evaluate
the impact of interventions
Connections between Psychological Safety and HR Technology
•Participating in voice opportunitiesvia
digital channels
•Trusting organization’s intentions and
engaging with intelligent technology to
personalize the employee experience
•Sharing information in platforms (and
with the organization) about personal
characteristics, preferences, or
aspirations so recommendations can
be curated
•Improving employee psychological
safety knowledge & skills
•Improving manager skills to foster
psychological safety & high-quality
relationships within their teams
•Embedding psychological safety as a
value through organizational
interventions
•Measuring and monitoring team and
organizational psychological safety in a
snapshot or continuous listening
capacity

26. Thank you.
Contact information:
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