Looking outside teams to foster safety within

Join our Organisational Theory and Information Systems seminar

Join our seminar ‘Looking Outside Teams to Foster Safety Within: Scaffolding Psychological Safety and Voicing on Unsafe Teams Via an Outsider Voice Conduit’

Speaker: Professor Julia DiBenigno of Yale University

About this seminar

Those on an organisation’s frontlines are best positioned to notice early signs of impending emergencies that can escalate into death or disaster when unvoiced. Prior literature suggests that psychological safety, a critical antecedent of upward voicing, is necessary for frontline concerns to be promptly reported to those with authority on their teams. Yet many teams face modern working conditions unconducive to sustaining psychological safety (such as member churn and rotation and lack of co-location). How can organisations ensure that frontline concerns are still consistently raised and attended to on teams with chronically unsafe climates?

Drawing on data from a multi-year ethnography of a US hospital, we show how those in an organisation-wide outsider role can scaffold psychological safety across an organisation’s unsafe teams. We conceptualise this role as a voice conduit. We show how those in such roles can use voice elicitation practices to cultivate zones of safety outside otherwise unsafe teams to regularly elicit frontline concerns (in this case, from bedside nurses) alongside voice amplification practices to cultivate a zone of influence with team authority holders (in this case, primarily physicians) so that frontline concerns are heard and acted upon. We further theorise enabling role characteristics that help voice conduits be perceived as simultaneously safer for frontline team members to share concerns with while also more protected to raise frontline concerns to authority holders with less interpersonal risk.

Prior scholarship on psychological safety has focused on promoting psychological safety internally within teams. Our study, however, offers a novel structural perspective by exploring the promise of designing support roles external to teams to scaffold frontline psychological safety and voicing across an organisation.

Speaker bio

Julia DiBenigno is an organisational ethnographer and field researcher. Her scholarship seeks to advance our understanding of topics related to the sociology of work and occupations, collaboration between professional groups, upward influence and voice, and change in organisations. Her research has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organizational Science and the Academy of Management Annals, and has won multiple best paper and best dissertation awards.

Professor DiBenigno specialises in qualitative, ethnographic methodologies (for example, observation and interviewing). Using these methods, she immerses herself in the social worlds of those she studies to develop novel organisational theories while addressing pressing problems. These range from improving soldier mental healthcare delivery to supporting frontline caregivers during the COVID-19 crisis. She received her PhD and MS in Work and Organization Studies from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Before that, she worked as a consultant for Deloitte’s Organization and Change practice and received a BA in psychology from Columbia University where she graduated summa cum laude as salutatorian.

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