Fostering Psychological Safety in Teams: Evidence from an RCT

Abstract

Psychological safety (PsyS) is an important driver of teams’ performance and organizations are keen to foster it. However, there is little causal evidence on what drives it and how to increase it. This paper is the first to test experimentally the impact of a PsyS intervention in a large firm, establishing causal evidence for the antecedents of the construct. We evaluate the role of individualized attention of the manager to each employee in her team by encouraging managers to hold 1-to-1 meetings and to focus them on improving PsyS. Additionally, we exogenously vary the specific target of those meetings: focusing the employees’ needs and aspirations as individuals, or on allowing employees’ to better execute tasks and remove blockers that may hinder their best work. We find that, despite this very non-invasive intervention, the behavior of managers changed as they increased the number of meetings. PsyS also increased as did the relationship of team members to the manager, particularly in the treatment arm that focused on the employees’ individual needs. There was also interesting heterogeneity with respect to how teams respond to the two treatments, depending on their initial level of PsyS.