Psychological Safety

Managing Research Software Projects

Greg Wilson

2026

Learning Objectives

  • Describe what psychological safety is and why it predicts team performance.
  • Identify specific behaviors that create or destroy it.

What Psychological Safety Is

  • The shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks.
  • It is the strongest predictor of team learning behavior.
  • High-safety teams admit errors, ask questions, and flag problems early.
  • Low-safety teams miss more problems and learn less from them.
  • Safety is not niceness or the absence of conflict.

What Managers Do That Destroys It

  • Responding to bad news with visible frustration.
  • Dismissing questions in public.
  • Solving someone’s problem for them instead of helping them solve it.
  • Only seeking input from the same small number of people.
  • Changing direction without explaining why.

Why Researchers Stay Silent

  • Fear of being scooped by a competing lab.
  • Fear that asking questions signals you cannot do the science.
  • Fear of challenging the PI who controls funding, authorship, and references.
  • These are real power differences, not paranoia.

What Managers Do to Build It

  • Respond to bad news with curiosity rather than frustration.
  • Acknowledge your own mistakes and what you learned.
  • Ask for input explicitly from people who have not spoken.
  • Ask what they already tried before offering a solution.
  • Close the loop when a flagged risk turns out to be real.

Measuring It

  • You cannot survey your team and expect an honest answer about safety.
  • Use behavioral proxies instead.
    • How quickly do problems surface?
    • How often do people ask questions in meetings?
    • How often do retrospectives repeat the same items?

Diagnose Your Team (10 min)

In small groups, list:

  • One behavior from your team that might indicate low psychological safety.
  • One thing you have said or done in the last month that could have made it less safe to bring problems to you.
  • One change you will make in how you respond to bad news.

Practice Responding (10 min)

  1. In pairs: one person describes a realistic bad-news scenario, such as a test suite has been silently failing for two weeks. The other person practices responding in a way that makes it more likely the person will bring problems sooner next time.

  2. Switch roles. Observers: note one phrase the manager used that would make you more likely to bring problems early, and one that would make you less likely. Compare your answers with those given by the LLM in the previous exercise.