Relaxing into differences and energizing into differences: How group-based play enables demographically diverse adults to co-create a climate of psychological safety

Psychological safety is a beneficial social-psychological state that promotes positive outcomes in the workplace, such as greater information sharing and enhanced organizational learning. Yet, how psychological safety dynamically develops as a process in groups generally and in demographically diverse groups particularly is understudied. Moreover, there is an insufficient understanding of how peer group members—group members who are not the leader—influence the progression and maintenance of psychological safety. We address these theoretical gaps through an inductive, qualitative study of a group-based play context. Grounded in data collected from 97 participants, including 56 interviews and 70 h of participant observation, we build a theory that illuminates how psychological safety is co-created through peer group member interactions during group-based play. We find that the opportunities afforded by group-based play disrupt exclusionary dynamics among demographically diverse adults and permit them to shift their relational risk motivation from pursuing goals of individualized self-protection to pursuing goals of relationship promotion with one another. This breaking out of default, protective relational patterns during group play enables diverse group members to have a greater willingness to (1) engage in relational risk-taking with each other and (2) support each other's relational risk-taking—a process we refer to as the relational risk promotion cycle. As diverse group members relationally play off of one another during this cycle, they begin to co-create a climate of psychological safety, in which they experience discrete events of relaxing and energizing into their differences. Our research makes theoretical contributions to the literatures on psychological safety, diversity in groups and play in organizations. Additionally, our findings suggest a critical role for leaders in which they are not solely creating the conditions for group psychological safety but supporting group members in working together to co-create a climate of psychological safety for themselves.