Events

Prof. Brian Gunia
Professor of Management
Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Johns Hopkins University

Research has long portrayed psychological safety as an unequivocal benefit for teams and their members. Yet, most evidence comes from cooperative contexts, in which team members share a collective goal. We ask whether the benefits of psychological safety extend to competitive settings. Focusing on distributive negotiations within teams, a common competitive context in which members’ interests conflict, we challenge the prevailing assumption that more psychological safety is necessarily better. Specifically, we suggest that psychological safety may lead individuals to restrain the assertive, self-advocating behaviors needed to secure favorable negotiation outcomes. Across seven studies (a recall study, two scenario studies, three archival studies, and an experiment; supplemented by three additional studies), we find convergent evidence that psychological safety suppresses the competitive behaviors necessary to thrive in distributive negotiations, partially because negotiators fear that such behaviors will undermine the team’s psychological safety. These findings reveal a critical boundary condition for psychological safety and highlight the need for a more contingent theory delineating the conditions under which psychological safety is beneficial and detrimental.