What leader behaviours contribute to psychological safety

Your ability to create psychological safety and build trust plays a large role in employee learning, performance and creativity.

Psychological Safety and Trust

Trust is ‘the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party’ (Mayer et al, 1995: 712).

The ability to learn and create is highly dependent on having space for experimentation and failure. This requires a high level of perceived psychological safety that is nested deeply in trust. Does your employee trust you as a leader and the environment within which experimentation hast to be conducted. Without experimentation these is no innovation.

Tust in organisations has been linked to:

1. Positive job attitudes
2. Enhanced team processes
3. higher levels of cooperation
4. better task performance
5. Innovation
6. problem solving and knowledge sharing

(Dahling et al, 2009; Dietz and Gillespie, 2011; Mayer & Gavin, 2005; Serva et al, 2005)

So if trust is so important how do you ensure you are building the right environment?

The Four Pillars of Trustworthiness

In assessing the trustworthiness of leaders of an organization they argued that people assess

• the ability or competence of their leaders to lead the organization
• the benevolence and goodwill displayed by those leaders towards other stakeholders (disposition to do good)
• the perceived integrity or moral code guiding the behaviours and actions of those leaders
• the consistency with which that ability benevolence and integrity is applied overtime, indicating predictability of behaviour

(Hope-Hailey et al 2014a, 8, drawing on Mayer et al 1995, Dietz and Den Hartog 2006)

4 Factors of Trustworhy leadership

Hope-Hailey et al, brought their findings into 4 factors were identified to be significant in what they called Trustworthy Leadership:

1. relationships - seen as a central factor in trustworthiness. Trustworthy leaders have good relationships and seek to develop relationships with employees, bosses, and people around them.
2. recognizing uniqueness - Very similar to the dimension of transformational leadership called individualized consideration: trustworthy leaders recognized the unique characteristics of the people they worked with and were prepared to develop those characteristics, take action, and respect them.
3. Mutual responsibility - exhibited by leaders accepting and meeting their own responsibilities, but also making space for others to take responsibility for their part. Holding themselves and also holding others accountable. This sharing of responsibility...
4. Real People - Connecting well with people and showing their real selves, demonstrating that they are real people. They aim to reveal parts of themselves and their lives, not to appear remote or distant.

What does this mean in your day to day behaviour?

8 Leader behaviours Important to building trust

Previous research cited by Hope-Hailey & Gustofsson(2014: 10) suggested there are 8 leadership behaviours that are particularly important for building trust with employees:

1. behavioural consistency: behaving consistently overtime and situations in order to increase predictability
2. behavioural integrity: consistency between words and deeds or being able to walk the talk
3. sharing and delegation of control: engaging in participatory decision-making with followers
4. Communication: communicating in a way that involves accurate information explanation for decisions and openness
5. demonstration of concern: showing consideration acting in a way that protects employees interests not exploiting other people
6. consulting team members were making decisions
7. communicating a collective vision
8. exhibiting shared values

Relations and Transformational Leader Behaviour for Increased trust

In my own research analysing the impact of preferred leader behaviour of senior medical and nursing staff I found the following Behaviour to facilitate building trust and psychological safety:

• presenting and owning ones own mistakes in front of employees models the desired behaviour and enables others to show vulnerability
• providing individualised consideration by attending to the needs for development and growth of individuals, provides arena for trust to develop where experimentation with new approaches can be made.
• providing support for learning and opportunities for individuals to take responsibility
• Encouraging mutual trust among members and enabling others to act by expressing confidence in performing of tasks
• recruiting new members based on mindset and willingness to admit their own past mistakes ensures that you are contributing to an maintaining and growing an open culture.

Building trust is an ongoing process which takes prolonged effort to build and yet can be destroyed in seconds through bad actions. How do you feel about building trust in the workplace and what experiences can you share?

In Summary, the impact of psychological safety and trust on employee performance and learning is significant:

• Increased Job Satisfaction: Employees who feel psychologically safe and trust their leaders are more satisfied with their jobs, leading to higher engagement and productivity.
• Enhanced Team Processes: Trust and psychological safety improve team dynamics, fostering better collaboration, communication, and problem-solving abilities.
• Higher Innovation: A safe and trusting environment encourages employees to share ideas and experiment, leading to greater innovation and continuous improvement.
• Improved Learning: When employees trust their leaders and feel psychologically safe, they are more likely to seek feedback, learn from mistakes, and engage in developmental activities.

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