Psychological Safety for Organizational Cultural Change : An exploratory study in a Swedish multinational chemical engineering company

Abstract: Implementing cultural change is a huge project for any company. Not only is it time consuming, there are also many factors that determine the success of a cultural change. This study aims to explore a number of these success factors from a social perspective of sustainability, in particular the employees’ perspective. The employee’s psychological perspective is more difficult to expose compared to the economic and environmental perspectives, because it has a qualitative nature and cannot be easily captured in quantitative models. However, this does not make the employees’ psychological perspective less important. Recent studies show that psychological safety supports the individual learning process and creates an openness and motivation for change. Results of this study show that a stronger sense of psychological safety can be created by a positive atmosphere among colleagues, a high level of trust, supportive leader behaviors, and systems that facilitate efficient information and knowledge sharing. Furthermore, the study contributes to the field of organizational theory by investigating the role, effect and perception of psychological safety within one multinational company.