Team engagement and psychological safety are both influenced by leadership effectiveness. When both are high, a team likely performs well. But what happens when a team experiences an imbalance? And how can a leader set things right?
On episode 151 of The Science of Personality, Melvyn Payne, commercial director at Advanced People Strategies (APS), an authorized Hogan distributor in the UK, discusses finding the right balance between team engagement and psychological safety.
“In the perfect ideal, everybody’s equal in the team,” Melvyn said. “Everybody has a voice. Everybody is comfortable putting their hands up if they make a mistake but then wanting to improve performance.”
What Drives Team Engagement and Psychological Safety?
The environment a leader creates for their team affects both their engagement and sense of safety. High-performing teams exhibit the right balance between engagement and safety. However, many teams tend to overdo one and underdo the other, particularly on senior leadership teams where everyone is a functional expert. These top executives might be more worried about job security, high stakes, and reputation than about sharing responsibility for successes and failures.
Team development sessions can reveal how leader behavior creates an environment of balance or imbalance. Using the lens of Hogan personality assessment data, APS began to offer a tactical twelve-item questionnaire around safety and engagement. This offering was developed from team sessions where participants seemed to resist confronting issues that were holding back performance. “We’re interested not only in the team working together, but also in individual development scenarios, where [a leader’s] individual behavior has an impact,” Melvyn explained.
Four Zones of Team Engagement and Psychological Safety
Many teams struggle to function with optimal equality and balance across engagement and safety. The model that APS uses to characterize teams can be described as zones in a four-zone grid:
- The High-Performance Zone - (high safety, high engagement). This team likely feels comfortable expressing opinions and admitting failures and wants to innovate, collaborate, be accountable, and improve. Melvyn described it as a balance between everyone heading in the same direction and having a safe space to operate in along the way.
- The Comfort Zone - (high safety, low engagement). On this team, members likely feel free to speak openly and make mistakes, but they may not hold people accountable for results or focus on achieving outputs.
- The Anxiety Zone - (low safety, high engagement). This team likely has a lot of accountability and drive for results but also high tension, discomfort, or anxiety about how failure will be treated.
- The Apathy Zone - (low safety, low engagement). On this team, members likely lack openness and drive. Melvyn mentioned that absentee leadership can generate apathy in teams.
These zones give information about the overall team, but insight at the individual level is helpful too. Even teams in the high-performance zone may have individuals respond to the questionnaire that they don’t feel comfortable asking questions, for example. “Although on the surface it looks good as a collective, that’s a great discussion point for the team. How do we make these colleagues feel more comfortable around asking questions?” Melvyn said, adding that results are always anonymized.
Even more than individual team members, leaders have a responsibility to respond to team data. If an imbalance is revealed, leaders must acknowledge the personality drivers behind their behaviors that are impacting the team culture. To do that, Melvyn directs leaders to a deep understanding of their Hogan data.
How Personality Shapes Team Environment
The three core Hogan personality assessments provide a portrait of how someone is likely to show up at work, including how they lead. The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) describes the values and drivers that motivate behavior from the inside. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) measures the bright side of personality, or everyday personality strengths. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) measures the dark side of personality, or potentially overused strengths that can emerge under stress, pressure, or complacency.
A person’s personality data show the degree to which they naturally feel safe in a group setting and how engaged they tend to be. A leader with high HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity will tend to create an environment where people feel welcome to share their thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, high HDS Excitable, Skeptical, and Mischievous scores could indicate a leader who creates an environment where openness might receive negative consequences. An indicator of engagement is the degree to which someone’s MVPI values match company values, with stronger alignment leading to higher engagement. Someone with a high HPI Ambition score will tend to show high engagement, although not universally. Anyone can become disengaged, just as anyone can feel unsafe.
Personalities on Anxiety Zone Teams
When team engagement is high and psychological safety is low, a team is operating in the anxiety zone. This anxiety can be an unspoken cause of behavior. For instance, one of the APS questionnaire items says: “I’m willing to assert my perspective to get the best result.” Someone who tends to show up as assertive would probably have higher HPI Ambition and Sociability scores. Someone with lower HPI Ambition and Sociability might also be willing to assert their opinion but feel uncomfortable about doing so.
On such a team, even someone with high HPI Ambition scores might be worried about making mistakes. Melvyn finds that members of senior teams don’t want to participate in team development sessions because they are concerned about trying something new and failing. Someone highly ambitious with a high MVPI Power score could feel anxious if they aren’t sure they can win.
A leader with high scores on HDS Bold or Colorful could readily share thoughts and feelings without hesitation while not realizing the effect of their behavior on others. Melvyn told a story about a team session where members reported they did not feel at ease speaking up or asking questions without feeling stupid. The leader’s Hogan data showed they had a risk of shutting others down and dominating the team. Directly after the team session closed, the leader reverted to familiar unhelpful behavioral patterns, telling a team member, “Don’t ever say that to me again.” This exemplifies how a leader’s derailing tendencies directly affect team culture.
Personalities on Comfort Zone Teams
When psychological safety is high and team engagement is low, a team is operating in the comfort zone. Melvyn identified MVPI Affiliation and Altruism as values related to caring for and cooperating with one another. High HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity also relates to getting along. On the dark side of personality, the HDS scales of Cautious, Dutiful, and Leisurely can influence someone’s desire to maintain relationships at the expense of engagement—to ignore the elephant in the room, so to speak.
Melvyn described a senior HR team with high MVPI Altruism and Affiliation scores that prioritized a high degree of psychological safety. Leaders outside of the team wanted the HR team to challenge their thinking around business and strategy as well as deliver HR solutions. Within the team itself, members were highly engaged and clear on expectations, but they paid less attention to their reputation across the broader organization. “What people wanted from them was over and above what they thought people wanted. It’s all about reputation, perception, and other people’s reality,” Melvyn explained.
How to Rebalance Teams
Rebalancing a team rarely calls for big changes. Often a leader needs to adapt specific behaviors to build more accountability or trust. This begins with recognizing gaps between how they see themselves and how others see them, or their identity versus reputation. “The premise behind Hogan is creating that self-awareness about how we come across,” Melvyn said. “We always suggest to leaders, how do you create feedback loops so you can calibrate how the behavior is playing out?.”
Teams need that rebalancing process also. A psychologically safe team that doesn’t hold itself accountable can learn to ask sharper questions that drive improvement. Although engagement and safety can differ greatly by team, the key is alignment. “For teams, do we have an agreed, consistent approach that’s right for our context?” Melvyn said. What matters is that everyone agrees on the method up front and calls it out when the method stops working.
Balance isn’t a fixed state but an evolving practice. As leadership effectiveness, team dynamics, and ways of working shift, the relationship between team engagement and psychological safety alters too. High-performing teams keep asking two questions to maintain balance: what’s working well, and what do we need to focus on next?
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 151 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!