Promoting Psychological Safety for the Development of Positive Digital Mindsets: Expanding knowledge of the design phase of construction projects

Abstract

Digitalization requires significant changes in organizational and project structures. Human factors are critical to the success of both small and large digital initiatives. Construction project design teams are highly interdisciplinary environments with rapidly evolving subject knowledge, and digitalization constantly changes their work processes. The existing research on construction management is insufficient in explaining how people in design teams think about these changes and how this impacts collaboration. This thesis aims to bring the construction industry one step closer to understanding what is needed to accelerate digitalization by focusing on human factors in the design phase. I assess team climates that may support human responses to technology changes. I do this by bridging the theories of psychological safety and digital mindsets from the organizational behavior field to enrich the construction management literature. Using the critical realism research paradigm, I have employed in-depth case studies, relying primarily on empirical research using retroductive reasoning as a method for analysis. I also created frameworks based on existing literature, which I used as lenses for data collection and comparison in the analysis. In the following paragraphs, I present the findings on what impacted psychological safety, how psychological safety and digital mindsets were connected, and how psychological safety and digital mindsets may be a foundation for purposeful digital industrial transformation. First, I found that distinct workplace characteristics in construction design teams impact psychological safety. For example, tight collaboration can lead to conflict and harm psychological safety due to intergroup tension. Also, speaking up was found to be more vulnerable in virtual environments than in physical ones due to a lack of social cues. Second, to develop high levels of psychological safety, I found structural elements such as task design, team composition, and context supports such as adequate resources and information to be essential. In virtual environments, accountability and accessibility were critical to guarantee that work was progressing and that they were included in the workplace. The main barrier to psychological safety in temporary design teams was found to be variety and separation diversity because it caused intergroup tension and thus caused knowledge barriers. Third, positive digital mindsets and psychological safety are interlinked and influenced by team composition, leadership, and context. Importantly, I found that psychological safety impacts team members’ beliefs about their ability to learn and that collaboration expands success. In other words, psychological safety provides the climate where positive digital mindsets may grow. Furthermore, I found the relation between the two phenomena to be reciprocal. I argue that implicit theories about learning and perceptions about resources support psychological safety in explaining why individuals behave as they do toward digitalization. Lastly, viewing the findings through socio-technical system theory strengthened the arguments for psychological safety and digital mindsets as essential conditions of the social aspect of digitalization. A climate of psychological safety cultivates positive digital mindsets, which motivate employees and team members to adjust their behavior. The loose and tight couplings theory helped explain how industry characteristics complicate the development of psychological safety within project boundaries. Also, I found that loose couplings of firms limit the benefits of learning environments in projects for a future digital industrial transformation. Related to the findings of this thesis, I consider the following to be the top contributions. - A strengthening of psychological safety as a team climate construct - Knowledge of the unique challenges that may arise in design teams in establishing learning team climates - Guidance for leaders on how to focus on what matters most in framing learning environments - Knowledge of how digitalization impacts team members, how it directs their behavior, and how mindsets may be facilitated to achieve support for digitalization strategies