Can I Get a Word In? the Impact of Turn-Taking and Gender on Engineering Design Students’ Psychological Safety

Abstract

Psychological safety and turn-taking have both been listed as key factors needed for collaboration in teams to emerge. Specifically, prior work has shown that increased communication in teams can lead to high psychological safety. Prior work on turn-taking as a measure of communication has mostly focused on its inclusivity in a team rather than its frequency. While the gender composition of the team can impact both participation as well as team psychological safety, there is a lack of research at the individual level. As such, this study provides the first attempt at connecting turn-taking, gender, and psychological safety through the analysis of members of fifteen engineering design student teams during the concept generation stage of their project. Specifically, we gathered video data to study how the number of turns and self-turns in a team impact psychological safety at both the individual and the team levels. We also examined how gender impacts participation and individual perceptions of psychological safety. The results found that turns and self-turns have a significant positive impact on an individual’s perception of the team’s psychological safety. However, no such relationship was found at the team level, indicating that there may be additional underlying factors in team level psychological safety. While we found that gender did not impact individual turn-taking, it did affect an individual’s perception of their psychological safety. These results provide quantitative evidence of the role of team communication on psychological safety.