MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Proven Tactics for Improving Teams' Psychological Safety

As organizations increasingly move away from top-down management controls to more democratized leadership built around empowered, self-organized, highly agile teams, building a culture in which employees can contribute fully and honestly to constructive dialogue and decision-making is essential. It’s well known that high levels of psychological safety are required for that — but what is less obvious are the evidence-based interventions that leaders can implement to create such an environment.

At Sandoz, a Novartis division, we ran a robust randomized controlled trial that included more than 1,000 teams comprising over 7,000 individuals globally to empirically test what works, in collaboration with external academics and behavioral science consultants. While we know a lot about psychological safety and its association with desirable outcomes such as higher productivity, better performance, and increased speaking-up behaviors, there has been little causal evidence suggesting how to foster it in practice.

About the Author

Chris Rider is a senior behavioral scientist at Novartis. Antoine Ferrère is global head of behavioral and data science within ethics, risk, and compliance at Novartis. Zsófia Belovai is behavioral science lead at MoreThanNow. Maria Guadalupe is a professor of economics at INSEAD. Florian Englmaier is professor of organizational economics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of their affiliated organizations.

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