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Frontline teams are at the centre of lean transformations, but the teams also transform as they implement lean. This study examines these changes and seeks to understand how lean relates to team psychological safety and learning.

This research setting is the Romanian division of a leading European energy company. The authors collected team-level audit and survey data, which the authors used to test the effect of lean implementation on team psychological safety and learning. The authors’ team-level data are complemented with qualitative interviews conducted with team members and headquarters leaders.

The results of the regression analyses show that leanness is positively associated with team psychological safety, which is in turn positively associated with learning. Thus, this research provides evidence that leanness – mediated by team psychological safety – increases team learning.

Lean changes team dynamics and learning positively by ensuring and promoting an emotionally sound work environment with clear team structures, an appropriate level of autonomy, and strong leadership.

This paper contributes evidence of important psychological mechanisms that characterise team-level lean implementation. Particularly, the authors highlight how team psychological safety mediates the relationship between leanness and team learning.

The purpose of this study is to examine the facilitating and inhibiting influence of team-level negative affectivity and conscientiousness on a dyad of emergent states, adopting and comparing both the composition and compilation perspectives.

Data were collected over three time points from 410 undergraduate students nested within cross-functional project teams (N = 62). The data, including individual self-reports and judges’ ratings of team performance, were aggregated to the team-level using both composition (mean) and compilation (skewness) approaches.

The findings indicate that mean-levels of negative affectivity were associated with decreased psychological safety. The use of skewed conscientiousness counterintuitively suggests too many highly conscientious members can also be detrimental to psychological safety. Psychological safety influences team potency and ultimately performance.

The results of this study highlight that the aggregation approach used is important. For example, the use of skewed (but not mean-level) conscientiousness brought an undetected and counterintuitive relationship to light. Future research should use compilation approaches in addition to composition approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between team psychological safety and team performance and to test the mediating effect of learning orientation and moderating effect of psychological empowerment on that relationship.

Data were collected from 50 teams and 345 team members from 20 different organizations. The moderated mediation analysis of psychological empowerment was tested using hierarchical regression analysis (PROCESS Macro) in SPSS.

The results show that higher the psychological empowerment, higher is the effect of psychological safety and learning orientation on team performance. Results supported the moderated mediation analysis of psychological empowerment.

Given that psychological empowerment and learning orientation of team members will effect team performance, organizational efforts to foster psychological empowerment should be rewarding. Focusing on channelizing team psychological safety to improve team members’ relationship, openness and comfort with each other will increase team performance.

The study incorporated learning orientation and psychological empowerment to redefine the relationship between psychological safety and team performance.

This study aims to examine the relationship between concrescent conversation environment (CCE), psychological safety and team effectiveness. Although CCE has been known to influence team outcomes, little is known about how it influences them. Integrating the social constructionist and social psychology perspectives, this study argues that CCE ignites a climate of psychological safety resulting in “joint-action” necessary for positive team outcomes.

Survey data were collected from 301 team members from US firms operating in different industries. Data were analyzed using SmartPLS.

The study establishes CCE as an antecedent to psychological safety and demonstrates that psychological safety mediates the relationship between CCE and team effectiveness.

This is one of the initial studies to show how verbal behaviors socially construct team dynamics in the shape of psychological safety to influence team outcomes. In doing so, the authors advance the theory pertaining to the role of social exchanges in team processes and outcomes.

The results provide insights on how managers can improve team outcomes by influencing the conversational environment of the team to elicit feelings of psychological safety. The results also suggest that managers must focus on relational outcomes as well, along with performance outcomes.

From a social constructionist perspective, team development is built upon the verbal behaviors of the members as they pursue tasks. However, the extant group dynamics literature undervalues conversations’ role in team processes and outcomes. This is the first study that examines the link between a team's conversational environment, psychological safety and team outcomes.

This paper aims to explore the impact of team psychological safety and team learning on the creation of team knowledge. When teams engage in learning, their interactions contribute to improved performance. Very little research evaluates whether the learning also creates new knowledge related to the task or the team itself.

The proposed model is evaluated through a mixed method research design around a team problem-solving experiment. Task- and team-related team mental models are elicited using concept mapping and questionnaires and are measured before and after the experiment. The model is evaluated in engineering teams from the USA and France.

The findings confirm the proposed model; team psychological safety and team learning positively impact team knowledge creation for both task- and team-related knowledge.

This research has theoretical, methodological and practical implications. The team psychological safety model is expanded, team learning is evaluated from the team interactions instead of members’ self-assessments and team knowledge is measured dynamically. Developing team psychological safety and creating team learning opportunities positively impacts the team’s knowledge.

Psychological safety climate has been commonly conceptualized as a facilitative team property. Despite the literature review and meta-analysis conducted recently, little is known about the potential dark side of psychological safety climate. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework to advance our understanding of both the bright and dark sides of psychological safety.

Drawing on extant theories and previous literature, the authors propose a conceptual framework of the mechanisms and boundary conditions underlying the relationship between psychological safety climate and dysfunctional team behavior.

The authors propose that the relationship between psychological safety climate and dysfunctional behaviors in the team is directly contingent on psychological safety climate strength, and indirectly contingent on task interdependence, group faultlines, group conflict asymmetry and team power distance differentiation.

First, the authors attempt to expand psychological safety climate literature by considering its potential damaging outcomes. Second, they contribute to the theory of psychological safety climate by suggesting a theoretical model consisting of the boundary conditions wherein psychological safety climate could reduce team effectiveness. Finally, the authors incorporate climate strength into the psychological safety literature to probe the antecedents of psychological safety climate strength and when it matters to the subsequent negative outcomes.

Organizations worldwide use virtual teams to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic and capitalize on distributed members' unique expertise to accomplish essential tasks. A critical reason that inhibits virtual team members from leveraging each other’s knowledge is a lack of psychological safety. Specifically, individuals are unwilling to speak out for fear of negative repercussions, such as embarrassment to one’s image and rejection from others in their teams. The purpose of this study is to advance the importance of distinct awareness (task knowledge and presence) enabled by information technologies in developing the psychological safety of men and women in virtual teams.

This study tested the hypotheses using a survey study of 94 participants from 19 graduate student virtual teams.

This study found that task knowledge awareness predicted psychological safety for men, whereas it was presence awareness for women. By demonstrating the role of awareness in promoting psychological safety for men and women in virtual teams, this study also sheds light on reducing online gender inequitable issues.

First, organizational managers need to incorporate gender when deciding the awareness type to promote psychological safety in virtual teams. For men, it is task knowledge awareness, whereas for women, it is presence awareness. Second, as there is a wide range of information technologies (ITs) available, managers need to identify if the provided ITs enable virtual team members to develop the specific type of knowledge awareness critical for psychological safety development. Third, managers can incorporate rewards and apply interventions at regular temporal periods to encourage team members to increase their online presence as well as question and share task-related content.

It is imperative to identify ways to encourage men and women working in virtual teams to speak up so that the expertise held by the members can be better leveraged. This study represents an important step in this direction.

Drawing upon the theory of communication visibility, this research intends to investigate the direct effect of enterprise social media (ESM) usage on team members’ knowledge creation capability (KCC) and the mediating effects of psychological safety and team identification. In addition, it aims to untangle how the efficacy of ESM usage varies between pre- and post-COVID-19 periods.

Using two-wave survey data from 240 members nested within 60 teams, this study utilizes a multilevel approach to test the proposed hypotheses.

We discover that ESM usage enhances team members’ KCC. More importantly, the results show that psychological safety and team identification mediate the ESM–KCC linkage. Interestingly, we further find that the impacts of ESM usage on team members’ KCC, psychological safety, and team identification are stronger in the pre-COVID-19 period than those in the post-COVID-19 period.

This research sheds light on the ESM literature by unraveling the mechanisms of psychological safety and team identification underlying the linkage between ESM usage and team members’ KCC. Moreover, it advances our understanding of the differential efficacy of ESM usage in pre- and post-COVID-19 periods.

This study aims to explore the influence of social interaction processes on transactive memory system (TMS) practice, the mediation of knowledge integration to the relationship between TMS and team performance and the moderation of team psychological safety to the relationship among TMS, knowledge intentions and team performance.

The authors collected data from a sample of 366 team members from 55 research and development (R&D) teams in Taiwan and conduct the analysis using the partial least squares method.

The results of this study indicate that social interaction processes have a positive effect on a TMS; a TMS can foster team performance, but knowledge integration mediates the relationship between the TMS and team performance; and team psychological safety can moderate the relationship between the TMS, knowledge integration and team performance.

Existing studies not only fail to explore the influence of social interaction processes on a TMS practice but also lack empirical analyses to explore knowledge integration as a mediator and team psychological safety as a moderator. This study fills that gap by developing a model that includes these types of relationships and suggests the importance of the TMS in the context of R&D.

As teamwork becomes more prevalent in organizational decision-making, the influence of emotional intelligence (EI) on team decision-making process demands more research attention. This study aims to investigate the impact of EI on team psychological safety and decision-making performance.

Team decision-making performance and decision quality from a team decision task were obtained from 54 decision-making teams composed of 241 undergraduate business students from a Mid-Atlantic university. Regression analyses were used to test individual and team’s EI relationship with team decision performance and the mediation effect of psychological safety.

This study provides empirical evidence that individual EI is positively related to individual influence on team decisions. Team-level EI improves team decision-making performance through increases in psychological safety.

The sample size is relatively small, and the participants were business students; therefore, the research results may lack generalizability. Future research is encouraged to explore this topic further.

As teamwork becomes more prevalent in organizational decision-making, the influence of EI on team decision-making process demands more research and managerial attention. The findings of this paper provide insights on the importance of individual/team EI and psychological safety in team decision performance.

This study furthers research showing that emotions are pertinent to social interactions, including group decision-making, and therefore suggests the desirability of investigating other social processes affecting group decision-making.