Benchmarking a Foundation for Improving Psychological Safety in Teams

Psychological safety is emerging in the literature as a gateway to creating high performing teams and high team satisfaction. Studies have demonstrated that psychological safety is a key ingredient in the ability of teams to perform to a higher degree than they otherwise would be able to. In this research, we continue to expand the assessment of psychological safety in senior capstone teams to include data from engineering programs across four different institutions to provide a sense of the experiences on capstone design teams and impacts interventions may have. We also begin to explore approaches to improve psychological safety in senior capstone teams by focusing on improving students' awareness of their ethics (the principles that guide their choices). The approaches include exploring the connection between personal values, personal story, and principles (or personal ethics) and students' behaviors that can affect psychological safety on teams.