Assessing Psychological Safety in Lean Construction Projects in the United States

This paper explored the links between psychological safety, Lean implementation and construction safety.

Surveys and semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 17 construction workers (project managers, workers, senior managers, engineers and more).

Providing background:

·???????? They briefly cover some of the empirical links between lean implementation and project and safety performance

·???????? One study “concluded that [Lean practices] decrease the likelihood of accidents by reducing uncertainty, rework and matching competency, and task demand”

·???????? Psychological safety (PS) was defined by Kahn in 1990 as “feeling able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career” [* although Kahn wasn’t the first to construct PS]

·???????? Edmondson later conceptualised PS as a team-level phenomenon, expressing it as a “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking”

·???????? In part, PS “facilitates the expression of ideas freely, speaking up about concerns, mistakes, and errors without fear”; but, importantly, it’s not just speaking up and voice behaviours

·???????? PS has been conceptualised and studied at individual, team and organisational levels, but the team level has been considered generally as the most meaningful level and is “mostly influenced by leaders within an organization”

·???????? Existing research can be grouped under different broad categories 1) research on the lack of PS, leading to organisational failures, 2) links between PS and facets of organisational performance, 3) PS and learning in organisations, including the links with PS in knowledge sharing, learning from failures, 4) PS and employee satisfaction, engagement, commitment, and creativity, 5) how PS weakens or strengthens other relationships

·???????? As Edmondson has forewarned, “A lack of psychological safety can create an illusion of success that eventually turns into serious business failures”

·???????? I like how this paper differentiated PS and psychological safety climate (PSC). I find it frustrating when research uses the term PSC but doesn’t define what precisely they’re targeting. PSC can either be the individual-level construct of safety climate, or describing a type of PS

·???????? Some work has linked PS and Lean construction, such as placing the value of people at the core of philosophies

·???????? Their conceptual framework linking the concepts is below.

They hypothesised the following:

·???????? Hypothesis 1: Lean implementation positively affects psychological safety through respect for people, trust, communication, lean leadership, problem-solving, continuous improvement, no blame culture, value creation, and waste elimination

·???????? Hypothesis 2: Psychological safety promotes construction safety through learning

·???????? Hypothesis 3: Psychological safety acts as a partial mediator in the relationship between Lean implementation and construction safety

Results

Findings included:

·???????? PS is of “utmost importance in terms of explaining the association between Lean and safety”

·???????? Lean implementation, with elements like respect for people, trust, leadership and continuous improvement “positively affect employees’ psychological safety”

·???????? People reported that PS affects their performance and motivation, “implying that a psychologically safe environment makes them feel confident”

·???????? They also emphasised that Lean principles “contribute to psychological safety especially respect for people and no blame culture”

·???????? Construction workers feel safer psychologically in Lean projects compared to non-lean projects

·???????? Nevertheless, “the majority of the construction employees do not feel psychologically safe at their workplaces either in traditional or Lean construction projects due to a number of reasons such as heavy workload, and deadline pressures”

·???????? Female participants were more likely to report problems with PS and disclosure of mistakes

When asked how team members react to an individual’s mistakes at work, the majority of workers reported that their team members react badly in response.

One worker expressed this poor team member response as ‘‘I carry the feeling of being judged when I am about to speak up the errors I detect, this makes me feel very demotivated to talk about errors and findings ways to solve them with my colleagues”. This same worker feared losing their job in response to speaking up.

Another question pertaining to whether team members can bring up problems and tough issues, most workers reported “no”, indicating that team members often avoid bringing up tough issues.

Some construction workers reported feeling comfortable asking for help from team members, but this often depended on that team member’s position. Others reported that some team members would “act in a way undermining their efforts to favour themselves”.

People reported that PS affects their performance and motivation, “implying that a psychologically safe environment makes them feel confident”. They also emphasised that Lean principles “contribute to psychological safety especially respect for people and no blame culture”.

People reported that they felt psychologically safer in Lean projects, compared to non-lean/traditional project structures. One angle is that Lean focuses on process improvement, which potentially enables workers to rely on problem-solving skills and “make errors visible through enhanced communication and trust”.

Here, higher PS in Lean projects was partially linked to the respect for people and the organisation’s vision and continuous improvement driven by Lean. In contrast, traditional project structures were seen to have several drawbacks, like “heavy workload, unorganized workplace, and deadline pressures which might result in increased workplace accidents”.

Nevertheless, even though people felt more comfortable in Lean environments, the majority still reported staying quiet in the case of detecting errors or unwanted performance; that is, “ staying silent is very common, even if the idea or question is important”.

Staying silent was seen as safer than speaking up, since according to Edmondson “no one was ever fired for silence”. Silence was also dependent on employee status, with higher status being less affected by silence and lower status “mostly stay silent in serious cases”.

Further quoting the paper, “the majority of the interviewees do not feel safe to raise concerns about upper-level managers’ errors or organization-related problems”

Female respondents raised even more concerns for silence, due to “the reason of silence because they might be exposed to ‘mobbing’ for voicing errors observed by them”.

Age was also linked to PS and voice behaviour. Young interviewees were more likely to speak up when they see something wrong, whereas middle-aged or older employees had more fear about losing their jobs or admitting to mistakes. Hence, higher PS was observed for younger versus older employees.

Note the limitations in this study – e.g. relatively small sample size (~17 participants) and based on self-reported performance.

Link in comments.

Authors: Demirkesen, S., Sadikoglu, E., & Jayamanne, E. (2021).?Construction Economics and Building,?21(3), 159-175.