Sample Solution

Previous empirical research & Study Hypotheses
Edmondson (2004) argues that leader’s behaviour is one of psychological safety’s antecedents, positing that leader behaviour is influencing team psychological safety by creating salient beliefs among followers regarding the way that the leader will use power and how this may affect a follower. As well, a meta-analytic review of psychological safety found leadership to influence the team psychological safety by shaping the work environment (Frazier, Fainshmidt, Klinger, Pezeshkan, & Vracheva, 2017).
In a cross-sectional study on 489 health care workers from 28 nursery teams, Raes et al. (2013) investigated how team learning behaviour is influenced by the transformational leadership and laissez-faire leadership. The results showed that team learning behaviour was better predicted by transformational leadership, due to transformational leadership being primarly related to psychological safety while it is not the case for laissez-faire leadership (Raes, Lismont, Decupyer, & van den Bossche, 2013). On the other hand, a study on organisational learning analysing teams 44 whtin community clinics in Israel concluded that transactional leadership is negatively associated with learning behaviours (Amitay, Popper, & Lipshitz, 2005). Even though the authors of the study do not link directly this correlation with the team psychological safety, they posit that obtaining valid information for learning requires psychologically safe environments that discourage the usage of defensive routines (Amitay, Popper, & Lipshitz, 2005).
H1: Transformational leadership is positively related to psychological safety.
H2: Transactional leadership is negatively related to psychological safety.
In a study analysing more than 160 leader-follower dyads, Wang et al. (2005) found evidence suggesting that LMX mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and performance (more specifically, task performance and organisational citizenship behaviour). The study concluded that the behaviours of the transformational leadership are a social currency that nourishes a high-quality leader-member exchange; that transformational leadership enhances followers’ receptivity for role expansion and extra-role actions via processes of social and/or personal identification; and that leader-member exchange gives leadership a more personal meaning (Wang, Law, Hackett, Wang, & Chen, 2005). In a case-based analysis, Roussin (2008) found that dyadic leadership discovery – “leader joining in honest, revealing, and (potentially) trust- building conversations with individual team members” – was more effective in increasing team psych