Feeling safe to be empowered: Psychological safety and psychological empowerment in threatening work environments

Abstract

Jobs are changing. Less routinized and more knowledge-intensive and creative jobs call for psychologically empowered employees. To achieve results in complex jobs, employees need to work together. Working together with others comes with interpersonal risks such as conflict, misunderstandings, and competition. Psychological safety captures the extent to which people feel safe to face these interpersonal risks. Based on the social information processing perspective, we shed light on when workers feel psychologically safe to be empowered. We investigate two complexities of this relationship to explain variations in the relationship: differences regarding the four dimensions of psychological empowerment (i.e. meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact) and influences from threats in the environment (i.e. global crises and perceived subgroups in the team). To test the hypotheses, we utilized data from three studies in working samples. Results indicate that employees indeed need to feel safe to be empowered. This relationship varies depending on the psychological empowerment dimension in focus and depending on the presence of threats in the environment. The findings shed light on precursors and boundary conditions to psychological empowerment in a complex and interdependent working world. Practitioners should be aware that under certain circumstances, employees need to feel psychologically safe to be empowered.