Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,
It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.
Furthermore, psych safety consists of 2 traits (covered in this article):
conversational turn taking (everyone in the group gets roughly around the same time to speak up) average social sensitivity (the individuals in a group have high average social sensitivity they can tell when someone in their group is feeling down or is upset).
Project Aristotle started in 2012 in Google People Ops.
Started looking into team composition (average IQ? Gender balance? Same hobbies/education background Found out that there were no patterns there.
Started looking at group norms instead. Insight here:
group norms determine how you act in a group and override individual properties + behaviours.
*Good group norms lead to better collective intelligence, regardless of whether the individuals of the group were brilliant or not. *
The norm that matters: conversational turn taking and average social sensitivity. Both make up psych safety.
Google has been trying to study and research the way work teams work and what is the best way to increase productivity.
The company believed that the best way to have the best team is by choosing the best members and choosing people that are the same so that the communication between them is easier but it turns out that these studies are not very accurate.
They started to research again for the reason behind some groups succeeding while the others might fail.
Studies show that some of the best work teams are friends who might socialize outside of the work field, while other groups succeeded while being total strangers to each other.
Some researchers found out that there is something called group norms that every group has and the success of this group depends on them following these rules.
Although these rules are not written and they are just assumed, they have an enormous effect on how groups work.
Some groups may have the norm of being inquisitive and they keep asking about everything including all of the details and they usually argue and have debates when they disagree with other members.
On the other hand, some groups might have the norms of being quiet and to do what they are asked for without discussing anything.
Some teams might have rules about the way you should speak. Some groups have rules about not interrupting the other speakers while others may welcome interrupting as a part that helps them to generate new ideas.
Some groups may stay formal with each other and keep distance while other teams may proceed to chat with each other.
That’s why the personality of the member does not always matter. If an introvert inters a team were debates are welcomed, he\she should try to get into these environments and the same applies to the extroverts.
The group norms are very important when it comes to the group’s productivity. Even when all of the group members are bright, when they do not work in a comfortable environment, the’ re unlikely to succeed.
One major factor in the group’s success is having all of the members expressing their thought and having an equal time to say whatever they think of. When only some members speak the productivity of the team majorly declines.
To sum up, the psychological environment takes a huge part of the team’s productivity, the respect that each member gets and the equal chances have huge effect on how they will work.