Collaborative Research: Uncovering and Enhancing Pathways to Psychological Safety at Work for Racial Minority Women

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Employee psychological safety, or the belief that one can take interpersonal risks at work without fear of retaliation, has been shown to have several health and productivity benefits for employees and organizations. One factor that is critical to building psychological safety is leader behavior. Most of the research has failed to consider that psychological safety may be cultivated in unique ways for employees who are members of socially disadvantaged groups, particularly for those in intersecting demographic categories who often experience unique challenges based on their intersecting social identities. Given the workforce has become increasingly diverse, building understanding of how leaders can best cultivate psychological safety among these groups of employees is a critical step to fully realizing the advantages of a workforce in which employees feel psychologically safe. As such, the project team is collecting data to support the development of actionable, evidence-based interventions that will help managers develop communication and leadership skills that effectively cultivate psychological safety of employees. The findings will support the development of leader skill trainings in organizations. The primary objective of this project is to build a more comprehensive understanding of the specific contextual factors that impact the psychological safety of members of some demographic categories at work, with the broader goal of improving diverse employees’ work lives and helping organizations to retain top diverse talent. Across three studies, the project team is interviewing both employees and managers whom those employees identify as having made them feel psychologically safe in the past to gain a better understanding of the unique needs of these employees to build psychological safety at work. Investigators are using this information to design, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention that trains managers to cultivate work environments that support and enhance the psychological safety of employees.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.