What is the relationship between the role of leader’s use of motivating language and of follower self-leadership skills in facilitating feelings of psychological safety (PS)?
New study I’ve summarised explored this question – post in the next week or two.
Key findings were that:
o Self-leadership and motivating language (ML) significantly influenced PS in India and USA
o This influence occurred via mediating influence of trust in leadership, leader inclusiveness and role clarity
o Mediation fully explained motivating language’s relationship with PS, but only partially explained self-leadership relationship
o Self-leadership showed an overall consistency. Self-leadership had a weak or non-existent relationship with PS without leader communication support, but a positive and strong relationship with PS when in the presence of ML
o These findings support prior research that organisational and leader variables are stronger predictors of PS than individual. E.g. A supportive work context accounts for 25% of PS variance, work design 28% and leader relations 20% of variance compared to just 13% of variance accounted for by personality.
Thus, ML and self-leadership positively influence a follower’s feeling of PS.
The mechanisms involved were found to be trust in leadership, leader inclusiveness and role clarity.
Interestingly, the role of leader guidance and support was critical in the effectiveness of self-leadership on PS. That is, “that to promote a follower’s psychological well-being, even workers strong in self-leadership need the guidance and support of a leader” (p20).
Finally, they argue that “First, leaders should have an awareness of how strongly their communication can influence a follower’s psychological safety. While we usually think in terms of how increases in motivating language use can improve this outcome, leaders must also recognize that drops in motivating language use can have an outsize influence on psychological safety”.
They had heaps of hypotheses to test – so image 2 shows a summary of their findings per hypothesis.
Ref: Authors: Mayfield, M., & Mayfield, J. (2021). Administrative Sciences, 11(2), 51.
Study link: https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci11020051
SafetyInsights.org 
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