DIV 5013 Module 3 Team Psychological Safety Assessment Example

Only 18 Percent of Errors Self-Reported: Assessing Psychological Safety on a Payroll Team

Student Name

American College of Education

DIV5013: People-Centered Leadership

Module 3 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 23, 2028

Introduction

Earlier papers set a people-centered direction for the 34-person payroll and payables group I lead in a Louisville hospital system's finance office and began using team members' strengths. Neither will work if people are afraid to speak up, ask questions or admit mistakes, which in payroll is not a soft concern: an unreported error can mean an employee is underpaid or a vendor paid twice. This paper assesses the team's psychological safety. It defines the concept, describes how it was measured with a survey and behavioral evidence, reports the results, explains them with research and identifies what needs to change.

What Psychological Safety Is and Why It Matters

In the original study of work teams by Edmondson (1999), psychological safety meant that members believed they could speak up, admit mistakes or disagree without being punished or embarrassed, and teams with more of it did more to learn: they asked colleagues for assistance, sought out reactions to their work and talked openly about what had gone wrong, and that learning in turn helped them perform. Frazier et al. (2017), in a meta-analysis, found psychological safety related to information sharing, learning behavior, engagement and task performance, and identified antecedents including supportive leadership, positive relationships with peers and clear roles. Newman et al. (2017), reviewing the literature, similarly emphasized leader behavior and supportive organizational practices as drivers. For a payroll team, safety matters most around errors.

Survey Measure

Team members completed Edmondson's seven-item team psychological safety measure anonymously, rating statements such as whether mistakes are held against people, whether members feel free to try something new and whether members can bring up problems and tough issues. Thirty-one of 34 responded. Results were reported for groups of at least five: payroll and accounts payable, and staff with fewer or more than three years on the team. On a seven-point scale, the overall average was 4.1, near the middle. The lowest item, after reverse scoring, concerned whether mistakes are held against people: 52 percent agreed that they are.

Behavioral Evidence

Surveys capture beliefs; behavior shows their effects. Over the last three months, the team corrected 214 payroll and invoice errors before they reached employees or vendors. Only 39 of them, about 18 percent, were reported by the person who made them; the rest were found by reviewers or by the recipients. In twelve team meetings observed over the same period, team members asked a total of nine questions, most of them by senior staff. And in individual conversations, three newer employees described checking the shared drive for old emails rather than asking a colleague how to handle an unusual payroll case, because asking felt like admitting they did not know.

Differences Within the Team

Safety was not uniform. Staff with more than three years on the team averaged 4.6 on the survey; those with fewer than three years averaged 3.4. Payroll averaged 3.8 and accounts payable 4.5, a difference that conversations suggested came from payroll's history of public error tracking under the previous manager, when errors per thousand checks were posted by name. Newer payroll staff were the least safe of all, which matters because they make the most errors while learning and are the people for whom early reporting would help most.

Explaining the Pattern

The research's antecedents map onto the team's history. Leadership: the previous manager's response to errors was public and focused on blame, and the meta-analysis identifies supportive leadership as a key driver of safety. Peer relationships: posted rankings encouraged comparison rather than help. Role clarity: newer staff were often unsure which unusual cases they were allowed to decide and which required approval, so asking felt risky either way. The low self-report rate is the predictable result. People hid or waited on errors, hoping reviewers would catch them, which is slower and costlier than fixing them at once.

Limits of the Evidence

The evidence has limits worth stating. Three people did not answer the survey, and those least comfortable may be the ones who stayed silent, so the true average could be lower. Self-reported errors depend on how errors are logged; some reviewers record catches more carefully than others, and the 18 percent figure could shift once logging is made consistent. Meeting questions are a rough sign, since some people prefer to ask privately after a meeting, which is healthy. And as the team's manager, I am not a neutral observer; conversations with me may have been more guarded than conversations with a peer would be. For these reasons the findings are read as a pattern across sources rather than as a precise score, and the follow-up survey will be run by a colleague from another department so that responses do not pass through me.

My Own Contribution

An honest assessment includes my own behavior. In my first months as manager, I sometimes corrected errors myself rather than asking the person who made them what happened, which saved time but signaled that mistakes were something to be quietly fixed above people's heads. In meetings, I asked whether there were questions in a tone that, according to one colleague, sounded like I hoped there were none. Small habits like these carry the old culture forward even when the formal practices change.

What Needs to Change

The assessment points to four changes. First, how errors are handled: self-reported errors will be treated as a contribution to accuracy, discussed privately and used to improve the process, and the self-report rate will become a team measure. Second, leader behavior: I will ask what happened before correcting, thank people for raising problems and admit my own mistakes openly. Third, role clarity: a written guide will set out which decisions each role can make on unusual cases and whom to ask. Fourth, meetings: each team meeting will end with a few minutes for questions about unusual cases, with senior staff asked to share a recent question of their own first.

Sequencing and Early Signals

The changes will not land at once, and people will watch the first few responses to errors closely. The first step, therefore, is a team conversation in which I describe the survey and error results, name the earlier public tracking as a mistake the department made and explain how errors will be handled from now on. The role guide follows within a month, drafted with two senior and two newer staff members. The real test comes the first time a sizable error is reported by the person who made it; how I respond then will tell the team more than any meeting. Early signals of progress will include newer staff asking questions in channels where others can see them, colleagues mentioning near misses before review and fewer errors found by employees or vendors, the costliest point of discovery.

Measures

Progress will be measured through the share of errors self-reported, from 18 percent toward a target of 50 percent within six months; the number of questions asked in meetings, especially by newer staff; and the seven-item survey, repeated in six months, with particular attention to the item on mistakes being held against people and to newer payroll staff's scores. The payroll error rate will continue to be tracked, with the expectation that earlier reporting will reduce the number of errors that reach employees.

Conclusion

The payroll team's psychological safety is middling overall and low around mistakes, especially for newer payroll staff, and only 18 percent of errors are reported by the person who made them. Research ties safety to leadership, peer relationships and role clarity, all of which the team's history weakened. Changes to how errors are handled, to my own behavior, to role clarity and to meetings aim to make speaking up normal. The next module will examine authenticity and respect in leader behavior.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113-165. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183

Newman, A., Donohue, R., & Eva, N. (2017). Psychological safety: A systematic review of the literature. Human Resource Management Review, 27(3), 521-535. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.01.001