Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: all
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The scientific process is increasingly dependent on large scientific teams working well together. Co-creating knowledge in this way, usually across disciplines and institutions, requires team members to feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks with each other; in other words, to have what is known as psychological safety. Although the importance of psychological safety for team functioning is increasingly well understood, the actions necessary to foster psychological safety are harder to define. We suggest that science facilitation expertise offers a path forward for scientific teams - particularly through the integration of outside facilitators or team members taking on the facilitation role - to identify dynamics that can promote or curtail psychological safety, interpret those dynamics accurately, and intervene appropriately to shift the group towards greater psychological safety. We describe how this cycle of observation, interpretation, and action can be employed to elevate the many different dimensions of psychological safety across the team process and at particularly important moments. We conclude with recommendations for how research teams might embed these facilitation practices into their work, and how institutions can drive more widespread recognition and development of the expertise needed to cultivate psychological safe scientific teams.