Is It Safe Yet? Perceptions of Psychological Safety Among Organizational Newcomers

Abstract

Healthcare delivery organizations face immense pressure to rapidly integrate new employees into their workforce. Because it facilitates learning, psychological safety may be essential to new employee integration, but little is known about how organizational newcomers perceive it. We leverage a sample of nearly 26,000 healthcare workers to measure and explore organizational newcomers’ experience of psychological safety using multivariate regression. Counter to our expectations, we found that newcomers experienced significantly greater psychological safety than their more tenured counterparts (b = 0.06, p < 0.001); particularly, we found that moderately tenured staff with between six months and five years of service perceived significantly less psychological safety than newcomers. We found some evidence that the longest-tenured employees, by contrast, experienced more psychological safety than newcomers, though the significance did not persist when including covariates. Among newcomers, role and demographics explained some variance in psychological safety. Overall, our findings suggest that psychological safety may decline as organizational newcomers adjust to the demands of their jobs, with particular vulnerability between six months to five years of tenure. Targeted efforts to promote psychological safety in these groups may help healthcare organizations maintain learning and performance after onboarding new staff.