I found this interesting – higher psychological safety was linked with people being “aggressively expressive” and may contribute to anti-organisational behaviour, among other factors.
They investigated perceived diversity practices and representation and the links with psychological safety and gender diversity promotion in >500 private banking employees in India.
PS. Check out my YouTube: https://youtube.com/@safe_as_pod?si=iUaDPJynPemQRZhY
A few cherry-picked extracts:
· “when employees feel psychologically safe, their contextual performance decreases. The high sense of security in workplaces makes employees aggressively expressive, making small issues big, taking risks, making mistakes, further avoiding extra tasks at the workplace”
· “the study highlights that excess psychological safety, equality in representation, and development opportunities to have “workforce diversity” make employees aggressively explicit and disengage them from additional work behavior”
· “The novelty of the present study is unlike prior research that indicated a positive relationship between psychological safety and employee performance the present research indicates that excessive psychological safety makes employees indulge in anti-organizational behavior, reducing the fear of repercussion, and decreasing contextual performance”
** Caveat: Though, of course, while most research has shown beneficial results from higher PS, this study seems to join a small number of other studies suggesting unintended and/or undesirable effects of higher PS in certain environments and team configurations.
** Which one researcher said was likely because few studies have actively investigated the unintended consequences or boundary conditions, rather than them not existing.
Ref: Dongrey, R.; Rokade, V. Assessing the Effect of Perceived Diversity Practices and Psychological Safety on Contextual Performance for Sustainable Workplace. Sustainability 2021, 13, 11653.
SafetyInsights.org 