While 92% of American workers believe it is important that their organization value their psychological well-being, nearly one in five Americans describe their workplace as toxic. This number is even higher for Gen Z: One in three describe their company culture as toxic. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gen Z is the most racially diverse U.S. generation, with half identifying as non-white.
What would help remedy this situation? Psychological safety is a belief shared among team members that it’s OK to take risks, suggest ideas, and make mistakes without fear of reprisal, ridicule, or other negative consequences. That safety is a goal worth pursuing: Studies have found psychologically safe workplaces enhance team performance and have higher-quality employee interactions, more job commitment, and greater information sharing.
But how psychological safety develops as a process in demographically diverse groups has been understudied. Now, a new qualitative study shows how interdependent, joyful, and spontaneous group-based play can lead to an increase in psychological safety in diverse work teams. The findings suggest managers and organizations might benefit from engaging in strategies to introduce more group-based play.
Adults at play
Published in the Journal for Organizational Behavior, the study zeroed in on how peer-group members influence the progression and maintenance of psychological safety over eight play sessions with 97 participants.
What did these sessions look like? In one, they played a game called “ABC Bodies,” that required participants and their partners to form the alphabet with their bodies. Another, called “Professor Know It All,” involved group members contributing individual words to build a coherent sentence to answer a question spontaneously posed to them by others in the session.
All participants were asked to use diaries to describe their emotions, feelings, or thoughts during the play activities, what they observed in other students, and how the context was similar or different from other learning experiences.
Through 78 diary entries, 56 interviews, and 70 hours of participant observation, the researchers found that group-based play disrupts exclusionary dynamics among demographically diverse adults. Play encourages them to shift from their own self-protection to rely on one another to complete a shared fun and whimsical task.
In an interview, a Black LGBTQ+ woman participant said, “It’s all about what you’re seeing and what’s funny at that moment. It spoke to me because it’s like every day I try to implement those principles of not really caring what other people think, just being me, bringing myself to the table and being OK with myself, like accepting of myself and others.”
The diary entry of a Latino woman said, “I think this class has exercises that might seem weird or uncomfortable, but because they are so weird and uncomfortable, I am sort of like ‘eh whatever.’ Everyone has to do it, so we are all weird together.”
And in an interview, one white male participant said, “When we’re playing, it kind of creates a sort of vulnerability. I’m just thinking about some people playing the mirror game last week. And it’s almost like before you know it, you’re doing something that is silly or not cool—something vulnerable. And there’s something about the mutual engagement or the mutual kind of like, ‘We’re all being uncool together.’”
Playing from me to we
According to the researchers, psychological safety is a by-product of group-based play because it shifts risk from the individual to the collective. Group play “enables diverse group members to have a greater willingness to (1) engage in relational risk-taking with each other and (2) support each other’s relational risk-taking,” the researchers explain in the study.
“In playing the interdependent, joyful, novel, and spontaneous games, diverse participants were able to redirect their focus from themselves and self-evaluation outwards toward their diverse partners and group members,” the researchers write. By moving away from the “ego-system” towards an awareness of each other in the broader “eco-system,” group members were able to recognize and experience their interdependence and connection with one another.
In other words, play had an equalizing effect and helped break down demography-based hierarchical distinctions. As one instructor described, “The games compel participants to give up relying on their statuses in order to navigate the play experience.”
The study’s findings have several implications. First, play for play’s sake can lead to psychological safety, which is associated with better individual performance and commitment. Second, play encourages dissimilar others to move away from self-protection in interpersonal interactions. Thirdly, managers and organizations can introduce weekly dedicated time for more group-based play activities into workgroups and project teams.
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