Leading psychologically safe digitally-enabled project teams

Abstract

The Industry 5.0 and digital transformation are impacting project businesses. Through a human-centric view, this work investigates how the pervasive digital information is impacting project delivery. Digitalization affects the human and social capital of projects beyond task-orientation. As people are vital in teams, we focus on how psychological safety and leaders can support this transition. Psychological safety encourages people to speak up, take interpersonal risks, and be oneself without fear of negative repercussions like humiliation, ostracization, or career damage in a work or group setting and fosters creativity, learning and team growth. This research explores how leaders’ behaviour establishes psychological safety in project teams affected by digital transformation. Through an empirical research design featuring 14 interviews with a diverse sample of experts and a qualitative data analysis method, we identified six factors conducive of psychological safety in digitally-enabled project teams, adaptability, learning, communication, organizational development, technology and workplace, clustered around the areas of individual characteristics, organizational leadership and project leadership. The findings suggest a twofold role for leadership in developing innovative and highly collaborative project teams related to strategic positioning of the team for technology adoption and creating an innovation culture from a human capital and social capital aspect.