Feeling Seen: Leader Eye Gaze Promotes Psychological Safety, Participation, and Voice

Psychological safety is a hallmark of effective team functioning. Although prior work shows that characteristics of the leader influence employee judgments of psychological safety (and subsequent decisions to speak up), we know very little about “the specific behaviors leaders employ to lead employees to assess an interaction as safe to speak” (Morrison, 2011). In this paper, we shift scholarly focus from gestalt evaluations of leader traits to focus instead on moment-to-moment leader behavior. We examine how a specific nonverbal behavior—eye gaze, especially eye gaze received from a leader—affects group members’ feelings of psychological safety and subsequent participation and voice decisions. In two lab studies of face-to-face group interactions (N=482) and one study of computer-simulated group conversation (N=547), receiving more eye gaze predicted more participation and voice (correlationally and causally), and this relationship was mediated by increased feelings of psychological safety and decreased feelings of ostracism. These relationships were moderated by individual characteristics of group members, such that the effects of eye gaze were stronger for racial minorities and more introverted individuals. When people feel seen, they feel safer and more welcome to share their ideas, and are more likely to do so.