Several implementing organisations suffer from a psychologically unsafe work environment. Unlike social safety, which deals with transgressive behaviour such as bullying, psychological safety is the belief that you are safe to take interpersonal risks. Employees who experience psychological safety dare to speak out, share their experiences with colleagues, and learn from their mistakes without fear of negative consequences or condemnation from others.
Psychological insecurity in implementing organisations harms citizens and the quality of public services. Without psychological insecurity, frontline workers-executives such as teachers and inspectors who deliver public services in personal contact with citizens-do not experiment with service innovation and deploy their resources less to help citizens. Psychological insecurity thus threatens frontline workers' responsiveness: their willingness, within legal frameworks, to take risks on behalf of citizens. And that while the government sees responsiveness as a path to better service delivery.
Yet we know surprisingly little about frontline workers' psychological safety, what factors influence it and how psychological safety determines their responsiveness to citizens' needs. This NWO Veni project therefore combines different theoretical perspectives and methods (ethnography, questionnaire research and vignette experiment) to study the psychological safety of frontline workers in order to improve public services.
By integrating insights from public administration, psychology and organisational science, this research project helps science to better understand the psychological safety of frontline workers. In addition, this project creates knowledge about how personal beliefs emerge in implementing organisations and social processes within them determine how public service delivery occurs. These insights will be used, among other things, to develop a training programme for managers and educational materials.
For society, this research project contributes to a safe working environment for and better well-being of frontline workers and a more responsive service for citizens that can improve their user experience of public services.