Chameleons or peacocks? Professional safety in culturally diverse teams.

by Thulasi Mohanadas
published in Assessment & Development Matters Vol. 13 No. 3 Autumn 2021. (pre-publication version)

“Professionalism” is a form of organisational socialisation and assimilation that makes or breaks psychological safety, particularly for ethnic minority employees who experience intense conflict between their social identity and organisational expectations. Is it better to ‘blend in’ for survival and safety, like a chameleon, or can you afford to stand out - like a peacock?

Key digested message
The role psychological safety plays in effective team relationships is overlooked in virtual team research. Cultural diversity often does not feature in the conceptualisation of virtuality. Thus the complexity of virtual team-working remains obscure. “Professionalism” - which is a form of organisational socialisation and assimilation - makes or breaks psychological safety, particularly for ethnic minority employees who experience intense conflict between their social identity and organisational expectations: Is it better to blend in for survival and safety, like a chameleon, or stand out like a peacock?

The impact of psychological safety
Psychological safety is the freedom to voice one’s beliefs and ideas without the fear of negative consequences to one’s career or personality (Edmondson, 1999); psychological safety therefore needs to be culturally contextualised. For example, Cauwalier et al., (2016) found that lowered psychological safety in Thai teams drove more learning than in corresponding American teams. Additionally the disparity of knowledge and experience in Thai teams impeded collaboration, rather than assisting learning as discovered in the American teams.

Furthermore, pro-diversity workspaces enable psychological safety (Guchait et al., 2016), and are especially important for minorities, who perform much better in such a space (Singh et al., 2013). Nationality culture, which is often the dominant feature of individual identity, determines a person’s characteristic traits, as well as the style and content of their communication. However, these differences operate at a subconscious level and often remain unacknowledged. Thus, it is critical to understand how the breadth of cultural differences in a team or environment influences a persons’ experience of psychological safety.

Virtuality is multidimensional. However, much of the existing literature on virtual working does not focus on cultural diversity. Gibson et al.’s (2014) meta-analysis discovered that only 39% of studies included nationality or culture as a part of their conceptualisation of virtuality, and, remarkably, only 4.6% of studies included nationality or culture in their empirical analyses.

Relationships and processes need to be studied in virtual team research. However, research has focused mainly on trust (Goh & Wasko, 2012) with little attention paid to the construct of psychological safety. Psychological safety remains to be explored for all its nuances and subtle variations across cultures in virtual teams. This study sought to explore how culturally diverse virtual employees experience psychological safety.

Methodology
Eight participants working in a virtual team across different organisations, with a mix of nationalities and/or ethnicities, took part in this study. Semi-structured interviews were used to understand how employees’ interpret events and behaviours, and the impact this has on their outlook whilst providing a framework of safety and sense of agency when speaking of uncomfortable experiences.

Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) was used to analyse the data. This methodology highlights the voice of participants and takes into account how social and cultural factors influence a persons’ thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Key Findings
1. Psychological safety is a dynamic and relational experience with cognitive and emotional dimensions, ultimately rooted in the individual. Context is vital to understanding what it means for a person to feel psychologically safe or unsafe. Participants who felt equipped to navigate the workplace experienced psychological safety. They comfortably concealed aspects of themselves and felt that being their ‘true’ self at work was not a liberating experience. From the employee perspective, psychological safety is not about unfiltered self-expression. Rather, it is about being psychologically savvy.

2. Employees experience conflict between their need for psychological safety and the organisational norms of professionalism. Professionalism pertains to the social etiquette at work, which includes rules about behaviour, communication, displays of emotion and appearance. Employees assumed a work-oriented self or corporate personality. ‘Emotional neutrality’, ‘objectivity’, ‘diplomacy’, ‘serious’, ‘competent’, and ‘reserved’ were some of the words commonly used to describe professionalism. Employees either overplayed their professional role or concealed the ‘unprofessional’ parts of themselves that they perceived would not be accepted.

3. Employees from minority ethnic backgrounds feel less psychologically safe when their social identity is at odds with organisational professionalism norms. For example, in order to come across more professionally, they assimilated to fit in with their environment and refrained from discussing hip-hop music or speaking in slang.

4. Minority ethnic employees who feel an affinity to professionalism in the workplace experience greater psychological safety and demonstrate their own unconscious bias towards the dominant professional culture. Cultural diversity issues are generally seen.

Discussion
Employees experience tremendous pressure to craft and cultivate a ‘good’ professional image, otherwise known as impression management (IM). IM strategies such as displays of personal competence, technical capability and social dexterity are used to influence how others perceive a person (Roberts, 2005). This may reflect organisational expectations about occupational behaviour (Kahn, 1990). But it creates a false persona, and in some cases, causes painful emotional dissonance and lowered self-esteem.

The pressure to conform is amplified greatly by the current discourse on ‘organisational professionalism’ which values logical, managerial, and commercial thinking and behaviour (Evetts, 2009). It encourages conformist behaviour as a way to overcome professional uncertainty. Group cohesiveness in this case may be counterproductive, as it reduces people’s willingness to contradict and challenge the professional views of their colleagues as well minimising variance in cultural differences in communication and work styles.

The social nature of identity means that what others expect and value can deeply affect one’s preferred professional image. Social identity-based impression management (SIM) is the strategy aimed at enhancing one’s professional image by influencing others to form a favourable impression of one’s social identity (Roberts, 2005). Employees used de-categorisation or assimilation strategies to enhance their psychological experience of safety. De-categorisation involves enhancing one's professional identity and limiting socially individuating information, and assimilation involves distancing oneself from one’s social-identity group and associating with a group regarded as ‘good’. Repressing group identity behaviours among minorities could lead them to acting unnaturally and negatively impacting their wellbeing.

Jodi-Ann Burey’s TED Talk (2020) on the myth of bringing your authentic self to work encapsulates minority ethnic employees’ experiences of professionalism:

“ . . . people like me . . . contort ourselves into this caricature of what some call professionalism, and what we call a distorted elaboration of white cultural norms and the standards that meet the comforts of those who hold social and institutional power. That's professionalism.”

Recommendations

For Minority Ethnic Employees

• Minority groups can utilise more effective IM strategies to achieve personal power, career growth and social endorsement at work and subsequently feel psychologically safer. IM understanding is helpful for employees who are increasingly self-managing their careers and relying on networking to secure employment opportunities. However, for others, this can pose internal conflict and emotional dissonance, especially, if they feel the need to repress group identity behaviours. Employees need to be supported to make conscious and informed decisions about the impact of the work environment on their identity, health, and career development.

For Managers
• There is no one-size fits all solution to developing a psychologically safe team. Leaders need to understand how organisational norms implicitly discourage certain behavioural styles or silence certain voices amongst minority employees. Additionally, they need to be willing to develop their reflective capacity in order to acknowledge their own blind spots. Subtle differences in communication, speech, and attitudes towards work styles are some of the aspects of unconscious bias masquerading as professionalism in organisations.

• Line managers need to be enabled to develop their role more broadly as a Team Coach. Given psychological safety is a dynamic and relational process, cultivating such an environment will rely on the leaders’ ability to initiate dialogue, collective reflection, and empathic challenge. The leader’s ability to move the team beyond task-work and get ‘under the surface’ of complex and sensitive relational issues affecting team performance is critical to psychological safety.

For Organisations
• Modern organisations face new challenges that have no standard solutions; organisational life is rife with uncertainty and anxiety. Psychological safety is not simply removing threat; it makes the individual resilient to face threats without feeling threatened (Kahn, 2001). Therefore, organisations must cultivate “safe uncertainty” and “authoritative doubt”. Safe uncertainty is the ability to stay comfortable with uncertainty, and authoritative doubt, a belief made of both expertise and self-doubt (Mason, 2015). This is more about “how to be'' than “how to”.

• Organisations must use an inside-out approach, which is holistic and intuitive, rather than piecemeal and linear. This approach is particularly useful in two areas of organisational life that have come to prominence since the pandemic - diversity and inclusion, and workforce wellbeing.

• Organisations must embrace diversity if they are committed to changing the systemic causes that hinder psychological safety. The focus of the problem should shift from the individual facing the problem to the organisational structures generating the problem. Commitment to the practice of allyship is critical (Nixon, 2019); acknowledging one's privilege, unlearning assumptions that inhibit change, and working with those who do not share the privileges.

• Organisations should also look at changing environmental factors that affect wellbeing and effectiveness at work. This is in contrast to interventions that focus on helping the individual cope and ‘fit in’ with their environment. These interventions assume that the onus of change is on the employee. Addressing the root causes rather than the symptoms is the key. Organisations need to ask themselves if they are ready and willing to engage with the deep psychological work required for systemic change.

The Author
Thulasi Mohanadas is a Business Psychologist, Executive Coach and Senior Psychotherapist. Her work is about developing individuals and teams to work in psychologically safe ways that embrace their uniqueness and uncovers greater capabilities as a collective. Her unique approach combines specialist fields of organisational and clinical psychology to harness a whole person view of human change.

References

Braun, V. & Clarke, V. (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, 77-101.

Burey, J.A. (2020, November). Why you should not bring your authentic self to work [Video]. TED

Conferences.https://www.ted.com/talks/jodi_ann_burey_why_you_should_not_bring_your_authentic_self_to_work

Cauwelier, P., Ribière, V. M. & Bennet, A. (2016). Team psychological safety and team learning: a cultural perspective.
The Learning Organization, 23(6), 458-468.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative

Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Evetts, J. (2009). New Professionalism and New Public Management: Changes, Continuities and

Consequences. Comparative Sociology, 8(2), 247–266.

Gibson, C. B., Huang, L., Kirkman, B. L. & Shapiro, D. L. (2014). Where global and virtual meet: The value of examining the intersection of these elements in twenty-first century teams. Annual Review of Organisational Psychology & Organisational Behaviour, 1, 217-244.

Goh, S. & Wasko, M. (2012). The effects of leader-member exchange on member performance in virtual world teams. Journal of the Association of Information Systems, 13, 861-885.

Guchait, P., Madera, J. & Dawson, M. (2015). Learning in the service environment: The influence of diversity climate. Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 26, 448-470.

Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work.

Academy of Management Journal, 33, 692-724.

Kahn, W. A. (2001). Holding Environments at Work. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 37(3), 260–279.

Mason, B. (2015). Towards positions of safe uncertainty. InterAction, 7(1), 29-43.

Nixon, S.A. (2019). The coin model of privilege and critical allyship: implications for health. BMC Public Health 19, 1637.

Roberts, L. M. (2005). Changing Faces: Professional Image Construction In Diverse Organizational

Settings. Academy of Management Review, 30(4), 685–711.

Singh, B., Winkel, D. & Selvarajan, T. (2013). Managing diversity at work: Does psychological safety hold the key to racial differences in employee performance? Journal of Occupational and Organisational

Psychology, 86, 242-263.