We-ness: the secret cause of psychological safety
I saw a post by Professor Rob Briner about the enigma of psychological safety, and in the replies it was discussed that in fact PS isn’t so much an enigma, there’s evidence that it is the output of group identity. It felt important to talk to Katrien Fransen about her work exploring this.
This conversation (and the papers that led into it) were real penny drop moments for me.
There’s a full transcript below.
Check out more:
Here’s Rob Briner’s post about psychological safety being hard to reproduce on demand.
More about Professor Katrien Fransen
I talk about a podcast featuring the boat race, you can check that out here.
We spend a lot of time talking about Katrien’s paper: The impact of identity leadership on team functioning and well-being in team sport: Is psychological safety the missing link?
We also discuss Unlocking the Power of ‘Us’: Longitudinal Evidence that Identity Leadership Predicts Team 5 Functioning and Athlete Well-Being
Her website focuses on the services that she and her colleagues provide for organisations.
Katrien is the co-author (alongside former guest Alex Haslam and Filip Boen) of The New Psychology of Sport and Exercise: The Social Identity Approach
Summary
- Creating psychological safety is not a mystery or something managers can simply demand; research shows it is actually the direct byproduct of a strong group identity.
- Studies into sports teams and organisations reveal that the formal boss or captain is rarely the most influential leader; instead, teams rely on informal peers to provide motivation and build the social atmosphere.
- True psychological safety is unlocked through “identity leadership”, which means shifting focus away from individual metrics and actively building a shared sense of “we-ness”.
Transcript
Introduction to the Enigma of Psychological Safety
Bruce Daisley: We are going to go into some specifics about sports teams, and you have bridged it a little bit there. When you are thinking about the application of discoveries in sport and applying them to the workplace, are there any health warnings that we need to have before we start considering these things?
Katrien Fransen: So most of my research has been conducted in sports teams because they are such a fascinating environment to study team dynamics, but we have also looked at the same leadership processes in other contexts like organisations, academic teams, and even walking groups. What is actually striking is that many of the same principles apply. I thought there would be more major differences, but whenever we look at the mechanics of shared leadership and identity leadership in sports, and then also in organisations for example, we see that the same theoretical framework and its applications apply.
Bruce Daisley: That is quite helpful, isn’t it? Because I guess sport gives us a straight line where we can see results, a straight line where we can see a rapid evolution of practices. But if we end up concluding that broadly these are human dynamics that we are witnessing, sport gives us the opportunity to greenhouse them to some extent.
The Complexity of Leadership Roles
Bruce Daisley: We are going to go in depth and look at two papers in particular. I have also linked to those papers and I have linked to your book in the show notes. I guess one thing that really comes out from the work that you have done exploring this is the notion that leadership is complex. Leadership is quite a complex idea to understand in that, quite often when we are thinking about leadership, we think about it in sport, but quite often in your paper, the most effective leaders are actually not the people who are nominally the boss, but who have some sort of leadership role inside the team. Those leaders within the team can definitely not be underestimated. That is very correct.
Katrien Fransen: Yes, that is absolutely right. And it is a very good point that you are making because if we think about leadership and leadership across all different kinds of settings, whether in organisations or whether it is in sports, we think about the coach, we think about the manager, the CEO, et cetera.
What Teams Actually Expect From Leaders
Bruce Daisley: I would love to go in and explore that. What are the attributes that build a leader or make someone perceived as a leader by their peers?
Katrien Fransen: They are quite different things. When we look at what they expect from leaders, for example from a captain, they look at a various number of behaviours. They say like, okay, we need them to give us technical advice, to make us play better on the team, to work better together. We expect them to motivate us, to make sure even if we are down we still can be motivated to do our job as well as possible. But we also need them to create a social atmosphere within the team to make sure we are a good group that hangs well together. And we also need them to represent us outside, to represent the team to others.
So we have a tactical leader, a motivational leader who is really good at motivating them to do their utmost best, and we also have a social leader who is responsible for creating a good team atmosphere within the team, also acting a bit as a trusted person when some players are in a difficult spot. Then they can help with it.
The Gap Between Formal Management and Peer Reality
Bruce Daisley: It strikes me that there is a really interesting thing that we need to understand that is often overlooked in the way that teams function. Some of these roles—like the motivational or social leader—are, in many ways, the appointment of the team themselves. This is lost from the way that we think about management right now. A new team will be constructed or reorganised, and it won’t take into account the idea that someone previously held that space.
Katrien Fransen: Yeah, I think you make a splendid point there. We often don’t look at those leadership behaviours or we don’t think about really appointing them, but I think that is exactly one of the problems in utilising the potential you have in the team. If you ask people what they expect from having a good team captain or a coach, et cetera, they mention all these behaviours. So what is actually happening is that we expect the formal leader of the team—whether it is a coach, a captain, or a manager—to display all of those leadership behaviours.
Because we expect the team captain to provide technical advice. We expect the team captain to motivate us when we are on the field, but also in the dressing room to make sure that there is a good team atmosphere. And when, for example, the press has to ask someone to represent the team after the game, that is also often the team captain. So there is a lot of pressure and expectations placed on them.
But when we look in practice, only in 1% of the teams—so one in a hundred teams—is the formal team leader actually able to meet all these expectations. The other way around, in almost half of the teams (around 44%), the team captain is not perceived as the best leader in any of those leadership roles. They are not the best on the field to give tactical advice, not the best to motivate the people, not the best off the field to create a good team atmosphere, or even to represent the team towards others.
Cultivating the Shared “We-ness”
Bruce Daisley: It was just a really interesting example for me. It is often a coincidence if those things lie together. In fact, quite often it is because we often perceive a high-performing team is when someone is able to manage to align both the motivational peer leadership and the nominal coach.
I read an example where a team’s success was largely credited to a really warm, entertaining team member who was by no means the best in terms of the performance metrics, but he was the social leader and the motivational leader in the team. When things went wrong, they just decided to reinstall this person into the team environment and fire their manager instead.
