We belong together: belonging to the principal’s in-group protects teachers from the negative effects of task conflict on psychological safety

ABSTRACT

Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Critical team events such as conflict and faultlines (hypothetical lines that split a team into subgroups) should impact psychological safety. Previous research has shown the benefits of task conflict on team outcomes under certain conditions and the consistently negative effects of demographic faultline strength on team outcomes. We propose that being close to the principal (what we call belonging to the principal’s in-group) should help attenuate the negative effects of task conflict and faultlines among teachers, because it is associated with a more effective working relationship. In a survey study with 244 teachers from 45 primary schools, we tested the moderating effect of belonging to the principal’s in-group vs. belonging to an out-group on the relationships of task conflict and faultlines on psychological safety. Results of multilevel model tests showed that relationship conflict (but not task conflict) and faultlines decreased psychological safety. However, when teachers belonged to the principal’s in-group as compared to an out-group, task conflict had no negative effect on psychological safety. We present implications to bridge the negative effects due to subgroup presence, so that psychological safety can become a resource for all.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychological safety
• task conflict
• relationship conflict
• principal’s in-group and out-group
• faultlines

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Anne Brantl, Juliane Ketzer, Katrin Kübeck, Mirjam Voß, and Adrian Lohfink for data collection assistance and Bertolt Meyer, Alexander Zill, Michael Knoll, Sasha Cook, and the reviewer for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. This research was conducted at Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Because the ASW measure can only be calculated with a complete dataset, we substituted missing values for the variable age, if possible, as follows: If teachers did not report their age, however, they reported how long they had been working as a teacher in their lifetime (working time as teacher) and at the current school (tenure), we estimated average values for age from the statements of teachers with similar demographics.