By Oriana Cavenagh (21-22)

Would you like to have high-quality relationships with your employees? Do you want to increase work engagement and innovation? Would you like your employees to feel empowered? If so, you need to foster both psychological safety and diversity and inclusion to promote voice at work. According to research by Forbes (2019), employees who feel their voices are heard are “4.6 times more likely to produce their best work” (Beheshti, 2019, p.2).

In fact, Google conducted a study that researched what made a team effective and assessed the dynamics that their top-performing teams shared (Rozovsky, 2015). The most important factor for a team performance that came out of that finding was not structure or dependability. Instead, it was whether psychological safety was present within the team.

Figure 1. Employee Voice (Perceptyx, 2021)

Psychological Safety is “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking” (Edmondson, 1999, p. 350). This team belief is one where everyone can speak their mind freely and can make mistakes with the knowledge that it won’t lead to negative consequences. It is where no one feels excluded, intimidated, or vulnerable and permits an environment, where the employee can bring up ideas or concerns without fear.

Diversity and Inclusion within an organizational context refer to acknowledging differences and recognizing the advantage of having a range of perspectives in decision-making (Lutfur & Green, 2022). As studies have shown that inclusion doesn’t necessarily follow diversity, it is therefore vital for organizations to help create an inclusive work culture (Edmondson, 2018; Ashikali, Groeneveld & Kuipers, 2021; O’Donovan, 2018).

So, why do you need psychological safety and D&I for voice?

Psychological safety helps unlocks the benefits of diversity through promoting inclusion and creating a “safe” environment for these diverse perspectives to be heard without fear. To understand psychological safety, one needs to understand diversity and inclusion. Research has demonstrated that psychological safety and inclusion can both help explain why employers share information, speak up and exchange with each other (Collins & Smith, 2006; Liang, Farh & Farh, 2012; Gong et al.,2012). Speaking up at work requires a certain level of uncertainty as to whether what they are going to say is justified or valuable. This level of uncertainty is often coupled with a fear of negative consequences if one spoke up. Therefore, it is important, that the employee who is voicing, feels included and psychologically safe enough to speak up. If employees do not feel included or psychologically safe, then they might not voice their opinion or ideas and hence this could hinder their own performance and an organization’s performance.

How does this link with my study?

By looking at the relationship between psychological safety and diversity and inclusion, my study aimed to see what mechanisms and behaviours leaders and managers use to promote employee voice.

This study was conducted by interviewing fifteen individuals who were either managers or leaders from different organizations and teams. Some managed large corporate organizations while others managed smaller businesses.

What did I find?

Based on my findings from the participants interviews, I discovered how interlinked the concepts of psychological safety and diversity and inclusion, through being encouraged by the same behaviours and mechanisms. These are: effective communication, vulnerability and mutual respect (as shown in figure 2).

Figure 2: How to foster both psychological safety and D&I

These three mechanisms can help increase voice at work through encouraging, empowering and creating the spaces for different perspectives and ides to be heard. Fostering psychological safety and D&I reduces the negative consequences of speaking up whilst helping promote a sense of belonging. Regarding the intertwined relationship, the study’s findings conveys that when one wants to understand and encourage psychological safety, one should also understand diversity and inclusion, since they can be driven by the same mechanisms. One cannot feel included without feeling psychologically safe and vice versa.

How to make use of these findings?

Below, are some practical recommendations that you can start applying within your team or organisation.

1. Start engaging with your employee from the beginning (after hiring). Mangers and HR directors need to understand that especially with diverse employees, hiring is not the finish line for unlocking the benefits of diversity. Having a diverse team does not mean that it is inclusive nor psychologically safe. Therefore, the importance of fostering an inclusive and psychological safe environment is crucial for gaining the advantages of diversity.

            Therefore, managers or directors should: 

• Have an Open-door policy to help show that you (leader) are available
• Mentoring or buddying up new employee to help make employee feel more included
• Share company values and expectations to help reduce miscommunication with knowing what they are signing up for

• Invite participation through communicating consistently and creating opportunities for voice will help employees feel comfortable enough to speak up without fear in spaces that are designed for that exact reason. Via this space, employees might voice up questions and ideas that they might have not done so if this space was never created.

            To encourage voice, leaders or managers should:

• Facilitate communication training strategies to help learn new skills and improve current communication
• Frame meetings as an occasion to learn with having no agenda or evaluation. This would help diverse perspectives and those who may not speak usually to speak up without judgement.

• Listen, instead of assuming. This skill is highly crucial for leaders and managers to utilize for their advantage as well as for their employee’s advantage. By actively listening, you are helping promote voice by showing that you have genuine intent of care for what that employee or employees are saying. Instead of interrupting them after the first sentence or being distracted by something else when they are talking. By not assuming, you are not placing that employee into a certain box which helps discourage poor relationships between manager and employee based on these assumptions.

To do this, leaders and managers should:

• Ask lots of questions instead of expressing your own views    
• Adopt the double loop learning technique and to help overcome assumptions (Argyris, 1991)             
• Listen with a giving attitude that encourages voice
• Use the ladder of inference model to help show the power of one’s own unconscious bias (Argyris, 1987)

I would like you to take from this study the importance of allowing all to be given a chance to be heard at work. Every employee has been hired for a reason, this being a positive one. Therefore, leaders or managers should harness this potential for a higher chance of organisational success and happier employees.

References for Blog

Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard business review, 69(3), 38-50

Argyris, C. (1982). The executive mind and double-loop learning. Organizational dynamics, 11(2), 5-22.

Ashikali, T., Groeneveld, S., & Kuipers, B. (2021). The role of inclusive leadership in supporting an inclusive climate in diverse public sector teams. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 41(3), 497-519.

Beheshti, N (2019) 10 Timely Statistics About The Connection Between Employee Engagement And Wellness. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nazbeheshti/2019/01/16/10-timely-statistics-about-the-connection-between-employee-engagement-and-wellness/?sh=41fe251e22a0

Collins, C., & Smith, K. (2006). Knowledge exchange and combination: The role of human resource practices in the performance of high-technology firms. Academy of management journal, 49(3), 544-560.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. 

Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–38

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth.  New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Gong, Y., Cheung, S. Y., Wang, M., & Huang, J. C. (2012). Unfolding the proactive process for creativity: Integration of the employee proactivity, information exchange, and psychological safety perspectives. Journal of management, 38(5), 1611-1633.

Liang, J., Farh, C. I., & Farh, J. L. (2012). Psychological antecedents of promotive and prohibitive voice: A two-wave examination. Academy of Management Journal, 55(1), 71-92.

Lutfur, A., & Green, M. (2022). Inclusion and diversity in the workplace. CIPD. https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/fundamentals/relations/diversity/factsheet#gref 

O’Donovan, D. (2018). Diversity and inclusion in the workplace. In C. Machado & J. Davim (Eds.), Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management. Cham: Springer

Perceptyx (2021). Employee Voice: What Is It & Why Does It Matter? | Perceptyx[Online Image]. https://blog.perceptyx.com/employee-voice

Rozovsky, J. (2015, November 17). The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team. re:Work. 

Retrieved from: https://rework.withgoogle.com

By Sophia Blaes (21-22)

The media is calling it the “great resignation”: talent is hard to find and even harder to keep, and job-to-job moves are at a record high [1]. Staff turnover means loss of organisational memory and skilled workers which negatively affects morale and productivity amongst the remaining employees, recruitment is costly and resource intensive, and all of this is having a detrimental effect on organisations’ financial performance [2, 3, 4, 5]. Whilst job changes will always be inevitable, some voluntary turnover may be avoidable. So, what can organisations do to reduce their attrition rates and invest in retention?

Firstly, we need to understand what influences an employee’s decision to leave their organisation. Leadership, culture and organisational design have often been considered as drivers, but this disregards the role the individual plays in all of this. Employees have an innate desire to fit in, and ambition for control and autonomy in their work [6], so naturally they seek organisations where they feel empowered to realise these. The psychological attraction-selection-attrition theory [7] suggests that when an employee and an organisation share a mutual attraction, they will select each other, and continue to do so until the fit is no longer right. A good fit is considered a valuable resource, which employees are motivated to protect [8], making them more willing to invest in their work and become engaged [9]. Highly engaged workers also feel a sense of responsibility and identification with their organisation [10], meaning they’re less likely to leave. Work engagement is a positive state of mind and is defined as vigour (e.g., energetic, resilient), dedication (e.g., involved, enthusiastic) and absorption (e.g., concentrated, engrossed), exactly what organisations want from their employees in order to perform competitively. However, to be fully engaged, psychological safety and meaningfulness are necessary conditions [11]. You start to see how it’s all interlinked, but how can we measure this fit and take value from it?

Fit can take many different forms, but most importantly here, it’s referring to person-organisation fit, person-job fit, PO and PJ fit for short. PO fit assesses the compatibility of someone’s personal values and those of the organisational culture, whereas PJ fit is split into two dimensions: demands-abilities and needs-supplies. They look at the congruence of an employee’s knowledge and skills with the demands of their job, and whether their needs, desires and preferences are met by the job [12, 13, 14]. It’s thought that these types of fit influence each other. For example, high performers who have good demands-abilities fit may have more alternative job opportunities, so when PO fit is low, they are more likely to leave their organisation, whereas if it’s the other way around and PO fit is high, but demands-abilities fit is low, employees would still think of their organisation as positively despite being incompatible with the job and therefore more inclined to stay. Yet there is surprisingly little research to explore this interaction further, and even less so to understand how it relates to engagement and turnover alike.

To bridge this gap, this study aimed to evaluate the relationship between PO fit and turnover intention and the impact engagement and PJ fit have on this.

The study

To explore this relationship, UK employees completed an online survey which measured their perceived PO and PJ fit, work engagement and turnover intention. Participants were recruited on social media platforms and through personal or professional contacts. The responses of 105 participants were analysed in this research.

The analyses showed that PO fit predicted turnover intention and that this relationship could be partially explained through work engagement, but PJ fit was not found to play a role in this. However, this should be interpreted with caution as non-significance does not disprove an effect, nor does significance prove anything with absolute certainty. More likely, it shows how complex their relationships are, especially because the study did find that all of the concepts are significantly related to each other, we just don’t quite know how yet and there are a number of reasons for that. Given we’re all different, we probably all place more or less importance on a specific type of fit, and this can be influenced by things like our personality, the people we surround ourselves with or the country and culture we have grown up in. Still, these findings pose valuable implications to carry forward into everyday organisational life, because organisations that fail to understand fit from an individual’s standpoint risk compromising their ability to generate an engaged workforce and ultimately will continue to lose skilled employees.

What can organisation do?

1. Be clear about your organisational culture, values and expectations from the offset. This can be done through internal communications, executive presentations or the provision of training. Implement this as early as the recruitment stage and into your selection tools to make sure you hire candidates that match your work environment, but also so that candidates know what they’re getting themselves into.
2. Work with your employees to develop positive psychological states at work so they can take meaning from it. Encourage familiarity with HR practices and available resources, support and benefits.
3. Drill down into what drives your employees. You could implement something like an ‘engagement appraisal’ which is separate from performance conversations to gain a deep understanding of their motivations and what you can do to support them from an organisational level.

References

[1] ONS. (2022). X02: Labour Force Survey Flows estimates. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/labourforcesurveyflowsestimatesx02

[2] Heavey, A. L., Holwerda, J. A., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2013). Causes and consequences of collective turnover: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(3), 412–453. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032380

[3] Oxford Economics. (2014). The Cost of Brain Drain. https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/the-cost-of-brain-drain/

[4] Park, T.-Y., & Shaw, J. D. (2013). Turnover rates and organizational performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(2), 268–309. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030723

[5] Shaw, J. D., Duffy, M. K., Johnson, J. L., & Lockhart, D. E. (2005). Turnover, social capital losses, and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 48(4), 594–606. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2005.17843940

[6] Yu, K. Y. T. (2013). A motivational model of person-environment fit: psychological motives as drivers of change. In A. L. Kristof-Brown & J. Billsberry (Eds.), Organizational Fit: Key Issues and New Directions (pp. 21–49). Wiley-Blackwell.

[7] Schneider, B. (1987). The people make the place. Personnel Psychology, 40, 437–453.

[8] Hobfoll, S. E. (2002). Social and Psychological Resources and Adaptation. Review of General Psychology, 6(4), 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.6.4.307

[9] Crawford, E. R., LePine, J. A., & Rich, B. L. (2010). Linking job demands and resources to employee engagement and burnout: A theoretical extension and meta-analytic test. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(5), 834–848. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019364

[10] Babakus, E., Yavas, U., & Karatepe, O. M. (2017). Work engagement and turnover intentions. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 29(6), 1580–1598. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-11-2015-0649

[11] Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work. The Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), 692–724.

[12] Cable, D. M., & DeRue, D. S. (2002). The convergent and discriminant validity of subjective fit perceptions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(5), 875–884. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.5.875

[13] Kristof, A. L. (1996). Person-organisation fit: An integrative review of its conceptualizations, measurement, and implications. Personnel Psychology, 49(1), 1–49.

[14] Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D., & Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of individuals’ fit at work: A meta-analysis of person-job, person-organisation, person-group, and person-supervisor fit. Personnel Psychology, 58, 281–342.