By Susannah Nash (21-22)

What’s it all about?

Have you ever noticed a mistake at work and thought better of mentioning it to others, for fear of their response or looking stupid? Have you worked somewhere everyone fears the boss or particular managers and go quiet when they’re around? On the other hand, have you ever been part of a team that bounds along, everyone pitching in to play with ideas, feeling the boss is ‘one of them’? What would it be like if a whole organisation worked like that?

Psychological safety is now acknowledged as a hallmark of the highest performing teams. It’s a shared understanding in a group of how safe it is to speak up in ways that might sometimes feel risky¹. That might mean raising new ideas, feedback or concerns, without worrying about how contributions will be received. Research shows that collaborations with high levels of psychological safety also benefit from increased positive impacts on group learning, creativity, information sharing and employee engagement². Where colleagues contribute freely, individuals feel more involved and motivated and organisations have the competitive advantage of benefiting from their full capacity. So everyone’s a winner! But is it an easy race? Despite the rewards to be reaped from developing psychological safety, it is quite rarely achieved at scale.

How and why we studied this across organisations

Levels of psychological safety are mainly studied in teams, each with their own manager and microclimate³. The leadership at any level is understood to have a significant impact on how safe people feel; their attitude and behaviour need to invite participation and feedback, encouraging employees to contribute². So there’s a lot hanging on both the head of an organisation and the management hierarchy.

There is little research at organisation-level, but workplaces that do appear to build such a climate across their staff boast great success- Google and Disney-Pixar are among them. This study sought to understand how psychological safety can be cascaded across a hierarchy. By interviewing leaders and managers from several organisations, we pinpointed what can be done to facilitate the development of psychological safety across different layers of hierarchy and get managers on board with leading in a way that generates psychological safety that then permeates a whole organisation.

What the data told us-

What should organisations do?

• Firstly, a foundation for psychological safety should be set across the functioning of the whole organisation. This is a purposefully designed environment, where colleagues feel they work together as equals in a consciously collaborative manner towards common goals. The top leadership needs to endorse and model psychologically safe behaviour and there should be little emphasis on rank, meaning colleagues at all levels communicate and collaborate openly. From the word go, new recruits should be introduced to this way of working, which is consistently facilitated. Colleagues across the organisation are bound together by the shared purpose of their work together and by a dedication to this climate.
• Secondly, organisations should have defined ways- both formal and informal- that facilitate colleagues fearlessly providing input. Providing a wide range of opportunities to contribute shows staff this is the norm and ensures there’s a format to suit every preference and occasion. These might include surveys, informal check-ins, performance reviews or time set aside to see how colleagues are doing. The staff needs to understand the purpose and structure of these and the management must make sure they aren’t overshadowed or inconsistent during more stressful periods, when it might seem easier to rush forward and reduce communication.
• Thirdly, organisations need to maintain a strong focus on the experiences and relationships of people in the process of developing and maintaining psychological safety. Leaders should be accessible, communicating across hierarchical levels, and authentic, helping others to know and trust them. Individuals may feel anxious about what they might lose by speaking up, or it might go against their culture and experience. Finally, it helps when teams are made up of individuals that know and understand each other well, making it easier to decipher motives and behaviours.

Embedding psychological safety is therefore an organisational development practice that requires intervention at three levels: across the whole organisation, within teams and on a personal level with individuals. The final concept may be about a shared perception of the working climate, but building it is about facilitating and normalising behaviour change.

What the data taught us –

Digging deeper, this is about developing ourselves and our teams differently

While we set out with a focus on vertical hierarchy and did find that behaviours of leaders and managers rubbed off on staff, interviews shone a light on the structure and development of teams as the key to nurturing psychological safety across an organisation. No matter how senior the individual, a sense of team belonging, and knowing and openly communicating with everyone in a group made them feel safer. In order to lead in such as way as to endorse psychological safety in their teams, the management also need to feel safe, understood and included by those above and below them in rank. Together with the desire for authenticity, equality, accessibility and clarity, these findings point to a conclusion that psychological safety can be fostered by perceiving teams as equal, close, highly interactive networks of individuals, rather than groups that only look to one manager to set the climate. Within these teams, which will exist in multiple constellations across an organisation and include its top leader, individuals that arrive influenced by contrasting backgrounds will benefit from personal support to adjust to such a working style. This might be through external coaching or one to one support, where they can reflect on their personal makeup and empower their voice.

In addition to suggestions from our core learnings, to embed psychological safety, organisations therefore need to prioritise personal and team development and continually:

• Get to know each other and understand respective roles
• All communicate
• Learn how to considerately deliver and receive feedback
• Set aside time to share positive and negative experience
• Create safe space for self-exploration
• Develop their shared sense of mission and positive energy
• Discuss how to work together and design processes to encourage participation

Remember, leaders are people too!

Learning to lead in a new way is a huge challenge. Not only should the hierarchy be fully involved as equals in team development, top leaders will benefit from feedback, coaching, training and good old incentives to help them on their way to creating an organisation that brings the best and most out of everybody. They can do this to the advantage of all.

Word count: 1100

References

1. Edmondson, A. C., & Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological Safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1(1), 23-43. 
2. Edmondson, A. (2018) The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. John Wiley & Sons.
3. Newman, A., Donohue, R., & Eva, N. (2017). Psychological Safety: A systematic review of the literature. Human Resource Management Review, 27(3), 521–535.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.01.001

A study on how the pandemic impacted leadership

By Lindsey Phillips (21-22)

As we enter a post-pandemic world, how has leadership changed? Scholars predicted that the pandemic would impact leadership and invited researchers to study the changes (Rudolph et al., 2021). On a global scale, the pandemic impacted psychological and physical health, work patterns, social interactions, and the economy. As the world returns to pre-pandemic levels of activity (The Economist, 2022), an opportunity emerges to explore how leadership has evolved.

Leadership: A brief history

Scholars began theorising modern leadership in the early 1900s and defined it as residing in powerful, all-knowing individuals who possessed certain traits (Northouse, 2021). Over the decades, new ways to conceptualise leadership developed, attempting to capture the increasingly complex world of leading. Currently, there are over 66 theories of leadership, and this number is increasing (Dinh et al., 2014). Some of the prominent leadership theories today have moved away from defining leadership as authoritative and controlling and include more follower and relational-oriented ways of leadership (Yammarino, 2013).

The study

To explore how the pandemic changed leadership, we interviewed 20 individuals about their experiences with leadership before and after the pandemic. These individuals represented a range of industries and had an average of 17.9 years of work experience. All participants were in mid-to-senior level positions within their organisations.

What did we find out?

After analysing the interviews, the study suggested that the pandemic did change leadership. This change could be described as leadership going from an organisational-first approach pre-pandemic to a people-first approach post-pandemic. The following sections will describe the findings further.

Pre-pandemic leadership

While theoretical conceptualisations of leadership had progressed to more people and relational-focused approaches over modern history, in practice, pre-pandemic leadership was slower to evolve.

Instead, participants described pre-pandemic leadership as more commanding and controlling and as having rigid employee expectations. This often led to micromanagement and implementing a ‘one size fits all’ expectation for employees where leaders expected employees to put organisational needs before personal needs. The office setting was noted as conducive to this hierarchal leadership, and participants agreed that flexibility to work from home was unlikely in the pre-pandemic as leaders prized physical oversight and expected behavioural conformity.

Post-pandemic leadership

Post-pandemic, leadership was described as more people-centred. While there were still descriptions of formal leaders, they were individuals who demonstrated increased care for employee well-being, acknowledged that employees were unique and had different needs, intentionally made time to connect with employees, and facilitated meaningful team interaction.

One individual noted how, post-pandemic, it felt gratifying when he received a text from his leader asking him how he was doing. While another individual, who was also a senior leader, referenced how a high performer requested (and received) unique working arrangements to care for their pet—something the leader would never have entertained before the pandemic.

Participants also described leadership as more thoughtful in communicating with employees and more intentional about in-person experiences. A common theme was that the increase in hybrid working caused leaders to be more deliberate about connecting and engaging with employees.

What do the changes mean?

The change in post-pandemic leadership to being more people-focused may have had a ripple effect throughout organisations. This can be dissected at three levels: the leader, leader-employee relationships, and leadership as a process, which is also known as relational leadership (see figure 1).

Figure 1

A model for post-pandemic leadership

1. The leader: Post-pandemic, leaders showed an increase in supporting well-being, individualised leadership, and intentionally communicating and facilitating meaningful in-person experiences. This was a change from pre-pandemic leadership, which was more authoritative and controlling and expected the employee to prioritise the business over their personal needs.

• The leader-employee relationship: As leaders demonstrated increased intention and care for employees, leaders may have instigated a reciprocal cycle of positive exchanges, indicating high-quality leader-member relationships (LMX) and more balanced relationships. When high-quality LMX is achieved, increased levels of trust, affect, respect, and commitment emerge (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). For instance, one participant noted that her leader trusted her to work flexibly post-pandemic, and in return, she said she works twice as hard. This is an example of an exchange. Over time, these exchanges can become reciprocal, leading to stronger relationships that are less authoritative and more balanced in power (Brower et al., 2000).

• Relational leadership: As leaders focused on people-first, they created opportunities for leadership to occur throughout the workplace, regardless of formal titles. This is called relational leadership, and it recognises leadership in the processes of interaction. Leaders helped create opportunities for relational leadership in two ways—through more balanced leader-employee relationships, which can increase trust, respect, and engagement, and through facilitating meaningful in-person experiences, where employees could connect and interact in the processes of leadership in action. Relational leadership can seem abstract at first, but a good way to conceptualise it is to remember that this type of leadership is found in how individuals interact, not who interacts (Uhl-Bien, 2006). In this sense, leadership is co-constructed among employees, multidirectional, and transcends hierarchy (Raelin, 2011). Relational leadership is not meant to replace individual leaders but rather to capitalise on the collective capacity of the whole. As leaders became more people-focused post-pandemic, they created environments conducive to relational leadership.

Looking forward

As the world adjusts to the new normal, leadership should continue to lead with a people-first approach (Wooten & James, 2008). Going forward, leaders can:

• Participate in leadership development programmes that support person-centred leading. Mindful leadership development can help leaders become more aware and intentional in their relationships at work (Tobias Mortlock & Robinson, 2019).
• Focus on creating high-quality relationships with employees by extending care and individual consideration, communicating deliberately, and prioritising connective, in-person experiences.
• Offer leadership development to more employees, regardless of formal titles. Leadership-as-practice-development (LaPD) provides individuals with experiential learning related to the context and challenges their organisation faces (Denyer & Turnbull James, 2016).

In summary, the study suggests that the pandemic changed leadership from a hierarchal and rigid approach pre-pandemic to a more people and relationship approach post-pandemic. Looking to the future, leadership should continue to prioritise people, which can positively impact individuals and relationships and reverberate throughout the organisation as a whole.

Blog references

Brower, H. H., Schoorman, F. D., & Tan, H. H. (2000). A model of relational leadership: The integration of trust and leader-member exchange. Leadership Quarterly, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/s1048-9843(00)00040-0

Denyer, D., & Turnbull James, K. (2016). Doing leadership-as-practice development. In J. Raelin (Ed), Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315684123

Dinh, J. E., Lord, R. G., Gardner, W. L., Meuser, J. D., Liden, R. C., & Hu, J. (2014). Leadership theory and research in the new millennium: Current theoretical trends and changing perspectives. Leadership Quarterly, 25 (1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.005

Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/1048-9843(95)90036-5

Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). Sage.

Raelin, J. (2011). From leadership-as-practice to leaderful practice. Leadership, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715010394808

Rudolph, C. W., Allan, B., Clark, M., Hertel, G., Hirschi, A., Kunze, F., Shockley, K., Shoss, M., Sonnentag, S., & Zacher, H. (2021). Pandemics: Implications for research and practice in industrial and organizational psychology. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 14(1–2). https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2020.48

Uhl-Bien, M. (2006). Relational Leadership Theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. Leadership Quarterly, 17(6). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.10.007

The Economist. (2022, September 9). The world is almost back to pre-covid activity levels. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/09/08/the-world-is-almost-back-to-pre-covid-activity-levels

Tobias Mortlock, J., & Robinson, J. (2019). Mindful leadership. In I. Ivtzan (Ed.), Handbook of mindfulness-based programmes: Mindfulness interventions from education to health and therapy. Routledge.

Wooten, L. P., & James, E. H. (2008). Linking crisis management and leadership competencies: The role of human resource development. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 10(3), 352–379. https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422308316450

Yammarino, F. (2013). Leadership: Past, present, and future. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 20(2), 149–155. https://doi.org/10.1177/1548051812471559