The Effect of Psychological Safety on the Performance of Students in Graduate-Level Online Courses

Introduction

Psychological safety is not a new concept. The term can be traced back to the early 1950s. Some give credit to Carl Rogers (1951) in his work where he began to apply his theoretical therapeutic approach towards psychology. He discusses the importance of providing a supportive environment for clients to establish the conditions necessary for creativity (1951).

Schein and Bennis (1965) are generally given credit for coining the term psychological safety. This is primarily due to their work in the area of organizational psychology and leadership. Their seminal research into teams and organizational culture set the stage for researchers such as Amy Edmonson (1999), who codified the term psychological safety with her research on organizational performance. Edmonson (1999) found that teams that felt psychological safety performed better than teams that did not feel a sense of psychological safety.

Recently, the concept of psychological safety has received renewed interest thanks in part to the Google study, Project Aristotle (Duhigg, 2018); Amy Edmonson's research and book, The Fearless Organization (2018), based on her work and research findings on the effects of psychological safety in the workplace (1996, 1999, 2003, 2006); and Tim Clark's book, The Four Stages of Psychological Safety (2020). All of the previously mentioned literature found that psychological safety is the primary component required for creating high-performing teams. Duhigg (2018) and Hu (2018) found psychological safety to be more important than any other component or trait of a team.

This study was conducted to explore if the presence or feeling of psychological safety within graduate-level asynchronous instructor-led online courses affected learning and the student experience, similar to the way psychological safety creates the environment that allows for a team to be high-performing. Chu (2022) found a decrease in learning when students transferred to online learning due to COVID-19. This decline in learning happened even though a widely held belief is supported by previous studies showing no significant difference between online and in-person learning (Wu, 2015). Wu (2015) conducted an empirical literature review supporting the findings that most studies show no significant differences in outcomes between the two modalities. Hanshaw, Helm-Stevens, and Lopez (2019) found that when online courses are built from a learner-centered perspective, these courses are often preferred by students over in-person courses. This contradiction is compelling and offers an opportunity to explore further what works for online learning and to discover if there is a need for psychological safety to undergird online courses to facilitate high-performing classrooms and affect the student learning experience. For the purposes of this study, high-performing classrooms are ones where students achieve high-grade outcomes and feel more positive emotions toward the course.

Literature Review

Psychological safety has a natural relationship with education. The idea that learning is an inherently social and affective enterprise has long existed (Dewey, 1916; Dweck, 2007; McLeod, 2007; Noddings, 2013; Vygotsky, 1978) Psychological safety is fundamentally about freedom from fear, embarrassment, or humiliation in groups (Edmondson, 1999). Looking at online learning through the lens of psychological safety allows one to view motivation and motivating students from an intrinsic level rather than the typical extrinsic “carrot or stick” approach. This aligns more with Dan Pink's view of motivation and motivating people as a need to influence internal drivers (2011).