No Risk, No Reward: Towards An Automated Measure of Psychological Safety from Online Communication

Abstract

The data created from virtual communication platforms presents the opportunity to explore automated measures for monitoring team performance. In this work, we explore one important characteristic of successful teams - Psychological Safety - or the belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. To move towards an automated measure of this phenomenon, we derive virtual communication characteristics and message keywords related to elements of Psychological Safety from the literature. Using a mixed methods approach, we investigate whether these characteristics are present in the Slack messages from two design teams - one high in Psychological Safety, and one low. We find that some usage characteristics, such as replies, reactions, and user mentions, might be promising metrics to indicate higher levels of Psychological Safety, while simple keyword searches may not be nuanced enough. We present the first step towards the automated detection of this important, yet complex, team characteristic.