Spotlight on SOTL: Harnessing the Power of Collaboration: Psychological Safety and Diversity

This article is based on the following research article:

Plaisance, K. S., Logel, C., & Lok, C. (2024). Making Collaboration Work: Fostering Positive Experiences and Attitudes around Psychological Safety, Diversity, and the Value of Teamwork. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 15(3).  https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotlrcacea.2024.3.14531

Groupwork has the potential to be a transformative experience where ideas are shared and workloads are divided. When all group members are aligned towards a common goal, it can be a rewarding experience. But with diverse perspectives and differing opinions, there is also an increased potential for tension, conflict, and an imbalanced workload. One way to maximize the collaborative potential of groupwork is to build each group on a foundation of psychological safety. This idea of psychological safety as the core of positive collaborative experiences is explored by Plaisance, Logel, and Lok, three undergraduate professors from the University of Waterloo who designed an experimental, interdisciplinary course and used their findings to create a framework that can be applied to all group collaborations at the undergraduate level and beyond.

What did the researchers do and find?

Plaisance, Logel, and Lok designed INTEG 201, an interdisciplinary undergraduate course on collaborative theory and practice, teaching students about psychological safety and diversity in teams. They ran the course in Fall 2018 (n=33 students) and Fall 2019 (n=25 students), and collected data from 53 students on their student experience and knowledge production around collaborative group work and psychological safety using a pre-survey (at the beginning of the course), immediate post-survey (after he course), and long-term post-survey (four months after the course ended).

They defined psychological safety as “a measure of how safe a team is for interpersonal risk-taking” (Plaisance et al., 2024, p. 1). The concept is that if a team feels safe to share and take risks, there is more potential for team members to get creative, share diverse perspectives, and offer feedback to help the group reach their goals. Plaisance et al. understand that group work is necessary to build collaboration skills and increase knowledge production, but groups with the highest potentially for doing ‘good work’ are groups that value diverse perspectives and have a foundation of psychological safety.

Overall, students felt equipped with knowledge and tools to be successful in both their current and future group work, psychological safety was extended outside of course, they felt safe to engage in group work with strangers after having learned the tools for psychological safety from INTEG 201.

How might you use this research in your teaching?

Plaisance, Logel, and Lok outlined six suggestions for instructors to follow in order to place psychological safety at the fore of group collaborations (p.15):

• Teach students about psychological safety and its importance as a predictor of team success
• Discuss the research on the potential benefits of diversity, and how psychological safety can harness diverse perspectives
• Give students time in class to get to know each other
• Design group projects and collaborative experiences that requires students to address complex problems and/or think creatively
• Emphasize and asses the collaborative process in addition to the products of group work
• Ask students to reflect on what did and did not work in their group, and what they can do next time to improve

Using these six suggestions as guideposts, educators can provide opportunities for students to practice collaboration skills, teach them to foster positive and productive collaboration, which, as the literature shows, successful teams are the ones that value diverse perspectives and have a great degree of psychological safety.

In order to make this kind of groupwork meaningful for students, instructors can highlight the necessity for collaborative skills both now and in their futures. By showing students how to support psychological safety in their groupwork, students can take this learning to support their collaborative potential in future undergraduate course work or prepare themselves for graduate programs or the workplace.

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