Interpersonal Risk and Organizational Reward

U.S. federal agencies have an enormous variety of responsibilities in their work to serve the American people, and for their staff, they must make personnel metrics, such as job satisfaction, team performance, and retention key considerations for agency leaders. However, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has struggled in its personnel management efforts. The literature focused on primarily private sector institutions has identified psychological safety — a construct that examines the extent to which employees can report errors, voice dissent, and take professional interpersonal risks without fear of retribution — as a meaningful driver of improved employee outcomes.

The author of this dissertation explores psychological safety as an interpersonal dynamic that quietly influences outcomes of interest at DHS, a public-sector institution with a high-stakes national security mission. The author uses regression analysis, semi-structured interviews, and exploratory factor analysis and ultimately finds that psychological safety has universally significant positive associations with DHS personnel outcomes and is a valuable workplace dynamic for personnel management improvement efforts. These findings hold for federal personnel working in the six largest federal agencies.

More broadly, interpersonal dynamics are found to have more-significant associations with teamwork quality evaluations than other workplace factors. The author also discusses additional insights, including the importance of a balanced exercise of authority among public-sector leaders, the critical relationship between leadership and psychological safety in national security institutions, and the trade-offs that managers could face in determining how to improve specific workplace outcomes.