Collaborative Research: Uncovering and Enhancing Pathways to Psychological Safety at Work

员工的心理安全感，或认为一个人可以在工作中承担人际风险而不必担心报复的信念，已被证明对员工和组织有几个健康和生产力方面的好处。建立心理安全感的一个关键因素是领导行为。大多数研究都没有考虑到，心理安全可能会培养在独特的方式为员工谁是社会弱势群体的成员，特别是对于那些在交叉人口类别谁经常经历独特的挑战，基于他们的交叉社会身份。鉴于劳动力变得越来越多样化，了解领导者如何最好地培养这些员工群体的心理安全感是充分实现员工感到心理安全的劳动力优势的关键一步。因此，项目团队正在收集数据，以支持制定可操作的循证干预措施，帮助管理人员发展沟通和领导技能，有效培养员工的心理安全。研究结果将支持组织领导技能培训的发展。该项目的主要目标是更全面地了解影响某些人口统计类别成员在工作中心理安全的具体背景因素，更广泛的目标是改善不同员工的工作生活，帮助组织留住顶尖的多元化人才。在三项研究中，项目小组正在采访员工和管理人员，这些员工认为他们过去曾让他们感到心理安全，以更好地了解这些员工在工作中建立心理安全的独特需求。调查人员正在使用这些信息来设计、实施和评估一项干预措施的有效性，该措施旨在培训管理人员培养支持和增强员工心理安全的工作环境。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.