Collaborative Research: Research: An exploration of how faculty mentoring influences doctoral student psychological safety and the impact on work-related outcomes

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There is a need to better understand how engineering departments can cultivate more inclusive, psychologically safe environments in which doctoral students feel safe to engage in interpersonal risk-taking, especially in research settings. A psychologically safe environment is characterized by people who feel safe to voice ideas and concerns, willingly seek feedback, have positive intentions to one another, engage in constructive confrontation, and feel safe to take risks and experiment, all of which are inherently risky interpersonal behaviors. In academic research environments, faculty have a major leadership role in cultivating a psychologically safe environment within research groups. While engineering faculty possess strong research skills, they often receive minimal to no training on how to effectively provide psychosocial support to graduate students and how to create a positive team climate. The literature suggests women and other underrepresented groups still frequently encounter “chilly” academic climates in STEM, or experience a lack of sense of belonging, leading to negative outcomes such as increased psychological distress and/or a fear of intellectual risk-taking that is essential to learning, creativity, and innovation. These outcomes hamper graduate students’ ability to fulfill their academic responsibilities, may dissuade them from continuing with their degree program, and contribute to a growing mental health crisis that is already plaguing graduate education. This study will further our understanding of psychological safety in academic research settings and inform the development of pragmatic strategies and interventions on how to cultivate inclusive, psychologically-safe research climates that support a wide-range of work outcomes. Identifying effective approaches to establishing psychological safety in graduate education contexts can lead to increased student learning and performance, which will support the professional formation of engineers and the production of innovative engineering research. Improved mentoring relationships and research climates will also support graduate student wellbeing, retention, and broadening participation. The overarching purpose of this study is thus to further our understanding of psychological safety in engineering graduate research settings and develop proactive solutions that can further promote doctoral students’ psychological safety in their research groups and mentoring relationship. Considerable research evidence in industry settings suggests psychological safety supports individual/group learning, performance, and innovation, and mitigates work-related stress. Yet there is no research that has been conducted to study the impact of psychological safety in research labs, nor how it is effectively developed by faculty. The proposed study leverages an explanatory mixed methods design coupled with longitudinal interviews. The explanatory mixed methods design will utilize surveys followed by two sets of interviews to examine the role of faculty mentorship in psychological safety of doctoral students in research groups and associated work outcomes such as learning and mental health. The survey will first characterize relationships between faculty advisor mentoring, doctoral student psychological safety, and subsequent positive and negative work-related outcomes and how these differ for students from different demographic backgrounds. The first set of interviews will explore the relationships identified by the surveys (explanatory design). The longitudinal interviews will document the experience of incoming doctoral students who join a research group and how faculty advisors communicate policies, norms, and values that impact the psychological safety of research group members. The results of this research will be leveraged to develop educational resources, including scenario-based training workshops for faculty advisors to support research group psychological safety and an educational module for graduate students to learn about psychological safety.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.