Conditions Promoting Psychological Safety in Self-Managed Teams

Date
2018-04-17
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Abstract

Although psychological safety has been identified as critical to team performance, and team composition represents an inherent influence on teamwork components, there is a dearth of research examining the relationship between team composition and psychological safety. The present effort addresses this gap in the literature by exploring the influence of team personality composition, using the five-factor model of personality, on the development of psychological safety in self-managed, autonomous teams. Psychological safety is measured at two time points, in the beginning of the team’s life cycle and several months after the teams have been working together on a highly interdependent task; this ensures the teams have sufficient time to interact and develop psychological safety. The results suggest that team composition does not have an effect on the development or maintenance of psychological safety, suggesting that other factors are more impactful in influencing levels of psychological safety across teams. This study also examines the influence of emergent leadership on the development of team psychological safety. Although there is evidence that leadership is related to psychological safety, the influence of leadership in the context of emergent leadership has yet to be examined. The present findings suggest that the emergence of a leader, and effective leadership, are critical for developing and maintaining psychological safety over time. Exploratory analyses further indicate that in accordance with previous evidence, more extraverted individuals are likely to emerge as leaders at the initial time point. Individuals with a learning orientation are also likely to emerge as leaders, however, these individuals also were found to have a negative influence on psychological safety. This result is contrary to theory. I suggest that the context, an unstructured task requiring a high degree of autonomy, may explain this discrepancy. A higher learning orientation is associated with an increased willingness to accept failure as necessary for learning. A leader exhibiting task failure may signify to the team that the team is a psychologically unsafe environment. Taken as a whole, this research provides insight into how psychological safety develops on self-managed teams.

Description
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Type
Thesis
Keywords
teams, teamwork, psychological safety, team composition, leadership
Citation

Marlow, Shannon L. "Conditions Promoting Psychological Safety in Self-Managed Teams." (2018) Diss., Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105749.

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