Exploring the relationship among psychological safety, knowledge sharing, and innovation

Abstract

With the rapid changes in technology and extreme global competition, organizations today have been forced to explore avenues to be innovative in order to survive this extreme competition and maintain their competitive edges. Innovation has made it possible for organizations to provide strategic advantages for costs reduction, new product and service disparity, and improved quality. This study explores and explains the connection among employees’ perceived psychological safety in the workplace, knowledge sharing, and organizational innovation performance in the context of public sector in Papua New Guinea. The findings show that psychological safety has a direct effect on organizational innovation and an indirect effect on organizational innovation through knowledge sharing. This study is a quantitative research using a self-administered questionnaire as the major research instrument to collect the data. Sample of this study were 160 employees of government agencies in Papua New Guinea who have been working in the agency for more than 2 years. The analytical results provide important practical implications for public sector managers in Papua New Guinea regarding how to encourage employees’ knowledge sharing behavior and facilitate organizational innovation performance.