Antecedents of Psychological Safety in Agile Software Development Teams

Context: Psychological safety continues to inspire researchers’ curiosity in various fields of study. It has been shown to enhance teams’ performance, efficiency, and learning, among other corollaries. Researchers are stretching the boundaries of these early findings to identify further effects of psychological safety. Recent work shows that psychological safety promotes knowledge sharing, norm clarity, and complements agile values. Objective: Studies show that psychological safety enhance agile values and practices, and some practitioners went as far as to claim “agile doesn't work without psychological safety.” Yet, researchers have not explored its antecedents. In this study, we sought to understand how psychological safety materializes in agile software development teams. Method: We opted for a two-phase mixed-methods study; an exploratory qualitative phase (18 interviews) followed by a quantitative phase (survey study, N = 365) to broaden the empirical coverage and test phase one's findings. Results: Our findings show that psychological safety is established in agile software teams when individuals, the team, and the leadership adopt and promote strategies conducive to promoting a psychologically safe workplace. While openness and no blame towards team members are the “butter and bread” of psychological safety, collective-decision making within the team and the leadership ownership remain the pillars of a psychologically safe workplace. Conversely, team autonomy, technical practices providing a safety net and slack time were not found to promote psychological safety. Conclusion: To institutionalize psychological safety in agile software teams, individuals, teams, and the leadership should consolidate their effort to adopt no blame, openness, collective decision-making in the team, and assuming the ownership of promoting a psychologically safe workplace.