| This study explores the relationship among team debriefing leaders, team psychological safety, and team learning behaviors in ad hoc teams following medical critical incidents. Following an observational content-analytic covariance design to capture the effects of naturalistic variability in team debriefing leader behavior on team psychological safety and learning behaviors, I videotaped and content analyzed team debriefings for forty ad hoc anesthesia teams after they experienced simulated high-stakes critical incidents. Through an exploration of the literatures on team and organizational learning, crisis management, debriefing, action science, and analogical learning, and with a focus on the effects of leaders within those literatures, I generated a set of testable hypotheses concerning the effects of team debriefing leaders on psychological safety and the effects of psychological safety on team learning behaviors. I tested these hypotheses using hierarchical linear modeling, where team members were nested in teams, and teams were nested within team debriefing leaders. Contrary to my hypotheses, I found significant negative effects of the team debriefing leaders' use of transparent evaluations on team psychological safety and team learning behaviors. In line with my hypotheses, though, I found a significant positive effect of the team debriefing leaders' use of analogy on team psychological safety on team learning behaviors. Furthermore, I uncovered a complex array of effects of the quality of the team debriefing leaders' evaluations on team psychological safety, team learning behaviors, and the variety of perspectives shared. This research makes a contribution to our understanding of the interplay among team leaders, psychological safety, and team learning in temporary teams. Thrusting a group of strangers into a highly stressful critical incident, where there were great reputational risks associated with making mistakes, I observed as this newly-formed team worked to make sense of and learn from this critical incident. By pushing to the edge of the limits of learning in risky settings in the midst of relative strangers, I have presented insights as to the types of team debriefing leadership behaviors that can facilitate the development of swift psychological safety and team learning behaviors. |
