What Is Psychological Safety?

Amy Gallo

Harvard Business Review

Originally posted 15 FEB 23

Here are two excerpts:

Why is psychological safety important?

First, psychological safety leads to team members feeling more engaged and motivated, because they feel that their contributions matter and that they’re able to speak up without fear of retribution. Second, it can lead to better decision-making, as people feel more comfortable voicing their opinions and concerns, which often leads to a more diverse range of perspectives being heard and considered. Third, it can foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement, as team members feel comfortable sharing their mistakes and learning from them. (This is what my boss was doing in the opening story.)

All of these benefits — the impact on a team’s performance, innovation, creativity, resilience, and learning — have been proven in research over the years, most notably in Edmondson’s original research and in a study done at Google. That research, known as Project Aristotle, aimed to understand the factors that impacted team effectiveness across Google. Using over 30 statistical models and hundreds of variables, that project concluded that who was on a team mattered less than how the team worked together. And the most important factor was psychological safety.

Further research has shown the incredible downsides of not having psychological safety, including negative impacts on employee well-being, including stress, burnout, and turnover, as well as on the overall performance of the organization.

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How do you create psychological safety?

Edmondson is quick to point out that “it’s more magic than science” and it’s important for managers to remember this is “a climate that we co-create, sometimes in mysterious ways.”

Anyone who has worked on a team marked by silence and the inability to speak up, knows how hard it is to reverse that.

A lot of what goes into creating a psychologically safe environment are good management practices — things like establishing clear norms and expectations so there is a sense of predictability and fairness; encouraging open communication and actively listening to employees; making sure team members feel supported; and showing appreciation and humility when people do speak up.

There are a few additional tactics that Edmondson points to as well.

The info is here.

Here are some of my thoughts about psychological safety:

• It is not the same as comfort. It is okay to feel uncomfortable sometimes, as long as you feel safe to take risks and speak up.
• It is not about being friends with everyone on your team. It is about creating a respectful and inclusive environment where everyone feels like they can belong.
• It takes time and effort to build psychological safety. It is not something that happens overnight.

Dunning–Kruger effects in reasoning: Theoretical implications of the failure to recognize incompetence

Pennycook, G., Ross, R.M., Koehler, D.J. et al. 

Psychon Bull Rev 24, 1774–1784 (2017). 

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1242-7

Abstract

The Dunning–Kruger effect refers to the observation that the incompetent are often ill-suited to recognize their incompetence. Here we investigated potential Dunning–Kruger effects in high-level reasoning and, in particular, focused on the relative effectiveness of metacognitive monitoring among particularly biased reasoners. Participants who made the greatest numbers of errors on the cognitive reflection test (CRT) overestimated their performance on this test by a factor of more than 3. Overestimation decreased as CRT performance increased, and those who scored particularly high underestimated their performance. Evidence for this type of systematic miscalibration was also found on a self-report measure of analytic-thinking disposition. Namely, genuinely nonanalytic participants (on the basis of CRT performance) overreported their “need for cognition” (NC), indicating that they were dispositionally analytic when their objective performance indicated otherwise. Furthermore, estimated CRT performance was just as strong a predictor of NC as was actual CRT performance. Our results provide evidence for Dunning–Kruger effects both in estimated performance on the CRT and in self-reported analytic-thinking disposition. These findings indicate that part of the reason why people are biased is that they are either unaware of or indifferent to their own bias.

General discussion

Our results provide empirical support for Dunning–Kruger effects in both estimates of reasoning performance and self-reported thinking disposition. Particularly intuitive individuals greatly overestimated their performance on the CRT—a tendency that diminished and eventually reversed among increasingly analytic individuals. Moreover, self-reported analytic-thinking disposition—as measured by the Ability and Engagement subscales of the NC scale—was just as strongly (if not more strongly) correlated with estimated CRT performance than with actual CRT performance. In addition, an analysis using an additional performance-based measure of analytic thinking—the heuristics-and-biases battery—revealed a systematic miscalibration of self-reported NC, wherein relatively intuitive individuals report that they are more analytic than is justified by their objective performance. Together, these findings indicate that participants who are low in analytic thinking (so-called “intuitive thinkers”) are at least somewhat unaware of (or unresponsive to) their propensity to rely on intuition in lieu of analytic thought during decision making. This conclusion is consistent with previous research that has suggested that the propensity to think analytically facilitates metacognitive monitoring during reasoning (Pennycook et al., 2015b; Thompson & Johnson, 2014). Those who are genuinely analytic are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their reasoning, whereas those who are genuinely nonanalytic are perhaps best described as “happy fools” (De Neys et al., 2013).

The research is here.

Urban Meyer, Ohio State Football, and How Leaders Ignore Unethical Behavior

David Mayer
Harvard Business Review
Originally posted September 4, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

A sizable literature in management and psychology helps us understand how people become susceptible to moral biases and make choices that are inconsistent with their values and the values of their organizations. Reading the report with that lens can help leaders better understand the biases that get in the way of ethical conduct and ethical organizations.

Performance over principles. One number may surpass all other details in this case: 90%. That’s the percentage of games the team has won under Meyer as head coach since he joined Ohio State in 2012. Psychological research shows that in almost every area of life, being moral is weighted as more important than being competent. However, in competitive environments such as work and sports, the classic findings flip: competence is prized over character. Although the report does not mention anything about the team’s performance or the resulting financial and reputational benefits of winning, the program’s success may have crowded out concerns over the allegations against Smith and about the many other problematic behaviors he showed.

Unspoken values. Another factor that can increase the likelihood of making unethical decisions is the absence of language around values. Classic research in organizations has found that leaders tend to be reluctant to use “moral language.” For example, leaders are more likely to talk about deadlines, objectives, and effectiveness than values such as integrity, respect, and compassion. Over time, this can license unethical conduct.

The info is here.