Developing Psychological Safety in the Workplace through Forgiveness and Other Leadership Virtues: An Experimental Vignette Methodology Study

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In a competitive talent landscape, many employers have turned to organizational psychology to better understand employee engagement and one of its key antecedents, psychological safety. While a growing body of descriptive literature has highlighted the numerous benefits of engagement, challenges to experimental research in the workplace have resulted in a dearth of empirical studies on specific interventions. In this study, we use an experimental vignette methodology (EVM) to examine how virtuous leadership behaviors contribute to psychological safety in the workplace. From a panel of 283 participants, individuals were randomly selected to read one of four different short stories or vignettes about a fictional workplace. The five-paragraph vignettes were identical except for a two-to-three sentence description of their leader (forgiving boss, humble boss, inclusive boss, or a neutral boss). After a brief reflection on the vignette, participants were asked to complete a survey with measures for psychological safety and work engagement. A review of descriptive statistics showed that mean psychological safety and engagement scores were highest for members of the forgiving-boss group. A one-way analysis of variance showed a statistically significant difference in mean psychological safety scores between groups. In addition, mediation analysis revealed that psychological safety mediated the effect of leadership virtues on work engagement. These results suggest that organizations may benefit from paying greater attention to leadership virtues.