Leader behaviour in creating and fostering psychological safety : experiences of recent business school graduates

Abstract

Psychological safety is a rising phenomenon that has become a timely topic over the years as employee well-being and organizational psychology themes interest more and more companies. Leaders are said to have a role in establishing psychological safety but there still seems to be unclarity of how exactly it is done. Additionally, understanding the point of view of future leaders can help to predict future leader behaviour and the direction organizational psychology themes might be heading to in the future.

Purpose of this research is to fill a research gap regarding how leaders create psychological safety and furthermore what type of role leader behaviour has in creation and fostering said psychological safety from the point of view of future leaders, recent business school graduates. Very limited amount of research has been done to study expectations and experiences of recent business school graduates, even though different operational fields, such as medical, have been widely researched. As recent graduates and younger generation of employees are soon to be a large part of the working force, it is important to find out their point of view regarding these themes.

This research was conducted as a qualitative case study and data was collected through semi-structured interviews with a sample of 6 recent Oulu Business School graduates. When interview data was reflected to previous literature, it revealed four themes: safe environment, leader behaviour, support, and feedback that graduates and existing literature recognized as enablers for psychological safety.

Based on the existing theory and empirical data, this work finds that by open and supportive behaviour leaders make employees experience psychological safety. High-quality relationships were used as a concrete tool to reach this type of behaviour as they enable an open stream of communication and therefore allow an environment to form were giving feedback and support is possible, further supporting the feelings of safety. In addition, this research found that to support the creation of psychological safety on an individual level, mapping out the expectations of new employees is beneficial since they can be very subjective and require different amount of attention from the leader. This especially applies to recent graduates, as the new generation of employees can have different values and expectations for leaders and the working life. With these findings, this research aims to contribute to the existing literature as well as offer useful information regarding creating and fostering psychological safety at the workplace.