The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

Amy C. Edmondson

Book | 2018

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

Abstract

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent—but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of “fitting in” and “going along” spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process. People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud; it creates a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing. This book explores this culture of psychological safety, and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life. The road is sometimes bumpy, but succinct and informative scenario-based explanations provide a clear path forward to constant learning and healthy innovation.

Keywords: psychological safety; knowledge economy; teaming; Management; Organizational Culture; Innovation and Management; Learning;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018.

Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that’s a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others’ thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees’ vision to include more-distant networks. By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.

Article | Manufacturing & Service Operations Management | Spring 2019

Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations

Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson

To scale service operations requires retrieving knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository has the potential to help peripheral individuals gain access to valuable knowledge because it is universally available and can be used without social interaction. However, for it to successfully serve this equalizing function, those on the periphery of the organizational knowledge networks must actually use it, possibly overcoming barriers to doing so. In this paper, we develop a multilevel model of knowledge retrieval in teams to explore how individuals on the periphery of knowledge networks—because of their inexperience, location, lack of social capital, gender, or role—access knowledge from such a knowledge repository. Unexpectedly, we find that individuals whose experience and position already provide access to vital knowledge use a knowledge repository more frequently than individuals on the organizational periphery. We argue that this occurs because the knowledge repository—despite its appearance of equivalent accessibility—is actually more accessible to central than to peripheral players. Thus, knowledge retrieval is not driven primarily by the need to overcome limited access to other knowledge sources. Rather knowledge retrieval is facilitated when actors know how to reap value from the knowledge repository, which ironically improves with increasing access to other sources of knowledge. We conclude that a knowledge repository is unlikely to scale service operations without additional intervention.

Keywords: teaming; teams; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Management; Service Delivery; Knowledge Use and Leverage;

Citation:

Valentine, Melissa A., Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats, and Amy C. Edmondson. "Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations." Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 21, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 346–360. View Details

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The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

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