Last week, Adrian discussed Edmondson’s (1999) ideas that a shared sense of team psychological safety leads to improved performance through enhanced learning and communication. When team members realize that they can share potentially ill-conceived ideas freely without the fear of sanctions, ideas of all qualities can flow more freely. This cognitive freedom to share contributes to increasing the overall flow of ideas. A high flow of ideas improves inter-team learning and consequently, overall team performance.
Power, as we learned from Keltner (2003), can also lower individuals’ cognitive inhibitions. Individuals with power have the ability to promote their ideas and those that emerge from their environment, and to influence the behavior of others. Accordingly, the empowered have the ability to vet and endorse ideas, and direct action accordingly.
These two different modes of achieving freer cognition are not mutually exclusive. The powerful individuals in a team may set the tone for accepting ideas in their team and accept ideas from all team members. Depending on the leadership’s persuasion towards wide-ranging ideas, they have the ability to set the stage for psychological safety in the group.
Interdepartmental collaboration will affect power and psychological safety dynamics, and consequently the level of uninhibited idea exchange. Each pre-existing team will have an established mode of sharing ideas and implementing ideas. The shift to collaboration will require new rules of engagement.
For the following hypotheses we suggest that Team A and Team B collaborate in the form of Collaboration C:
H1: When Team A has a higher established level of psychological safety and higher relative power (in the organization) compared to Team B, Team A members will provide more ideas in Collaboration C.
H2: When Team A has higher power (in the organization) than Team B, and Team B has more psychological safety than Team A, Team B will contribute few ideas in Collaboration C than Team A.
In the case of the UVa health system where collaboration is falling short of hoped for efficacy, discerning what inhibits idea sharing in terms of safety and power will offer insights towards improving performance. We could conduct structured interviews with individuals in context of their primary team functions and their collaborative functions. Coding for inhibited idea-sharing and the quality of ideas actioned would reveal the differences in both situations. We would also survey the participants to rate team power relative to the organization.
Excellent work. My only suggestion is that in the full paragraph preceeding your hypotheses, you make it sound like collaboration is an antecedent, rather than a consequence of power and safety.
ReplyDeleteIf I understand you correctly, you are saying that power is a moderator of the effects of psychological safety on collaborative performance. I'll be interested in how you go about disentangling power and safety--I think they may be sometimes conflated in the literature. Good luck!
ReplyDeletei agree with Greg - are you saying that either power or psychological safety or both can inhibit/promote collaboration? How will you know which it is? Do you mean formal power or informal power or either? Some details to work out, but in concept, a strong idea.
ReplyDeleteCool post. I think your second hypothesis would be even more interesting if you had a third team, whom, like team B, lacked the power of team A, but unlike team B, also lacked the comfort of psychological safety. In other words, this team would not only lack power but also psychological safety. Would this double whammy negative make for the least collaborative team?
ReplyDeleteInteresting scenario with good insight. How would you measure "team" power?
ReplyDeleteI like the juxtaposition of psychological safety and power. That's a good idea. At first I didn't think it would be, because I thought power would be conflated. Then I realized that you were conceiving it at a different level of analysis than I was.
ReplyDeleteI think, if I understood your entry correctly, that you are saying that when two teams (or units) collaborate (so collaboration is the boundary condition), one of those teams may share ideas more freely (dependent variable) than the other team. Good.
Next, you propose two constructs to explain that difference in idea-sharing. One is team power. This construct was not entirely clear (hence, Kelly's question about how you would measure it, implying the even more fundamental question of what it is), but I think what you are saying is how much power does that team have in the broader organization. If this is the case, then you would need to clarify further by addressing questions like, "How does a team enact power vis-a-vis other teams?" In either case, team power is a function of the team's relationships with other entities in or out of the organization. Team psych safety, on the other hand, is an intra-team variable.
Having clarified constructs, the next step is to explain the interaction you are proposing. An interaction should be more than just saying that having high levels of both variables leads to a particular outcome. You can achieve that without an interaction just through the adding of the two independent variables. An interaction effect should explain why the outcome is higher or different than would be expected by only including the main effects. I like that you are thinking in terms of interactions--I just want you to be clearer.