Presentation
Puzzles and Progress: Unlocking the Secrets of Psychological Safety Using an Escape Room to Study Team Dynamics
DescriptionAs medical care has become increasingly complex, healthcare providers must rely on contributions from all team members to ensure high quality patient care. For this exchange of ideas to occur, all team members must feel safe to share ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes, a concept called psychological safety. In the teaming literature, psychological safety is classified as an emergent state, which means that it is inherently dynamic in nature and can vary over time corresponding to team inputs, processes, and outcomes. Despite being the object of significant research over the past two decades, relatively little is known about how psychological safety develops over time in teams and between team members (Frazier et al., 2017).
Escape rooms have been increasingly used as a method used in educational contexts to enhance learning, as well as research contexts to study teams and enhance emergent states like psychological safety (e.g., cohesion, Cohen et al., 2021). They present an opportunity to study teams of varying sizes and compositions and offer an explicit episode to investigate the potential role of team processes in the development of emergent states such as psychological safety. Escape rooms have additionally been posited as a potential method to enhance psychological safety, on the basis that they provide a fun and engaging task without real work-related consequences (such as risk to patient life in medical teams; Willis et al., 2023).
The present study utilized a between-subjects, pre- to post-test design to assess whether participation in an escape room (within subjects, pre- to post-test) and a short intervention aimed to enhance team processes used during the escape room (between subjects, intervention/control) could improve psychological safety perceptions in undergraduate medical and PA students undergoing emergency medicine clerkship rotations. Additional study variables included team inputs of familiarity and perceived diversity, as well as perceptions and observed rate of team process behaviors [corresponding to the Mathieu et al. (2020) taxonomy survey] exhibited during the escape room. All scales achieved acceptable reliability in terms of internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha >.7) or inter-rater reliability (Cohen’s and Fleiss Kappa >.7) as applicable.
Seventy-three students participated in the escape room and completed the associated surveys. A mixed measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedure was performed to assess the effects of the escape room and intervention on psychological safety perceptions. There was not a statistically significant interaction between the intervention and time on psychological safety perceptions. The main effect of time showed a statistically significant difference in mean psychological safety perceptions reported at the different time points, with scores immediately following the escape room higher than before the escape room. The main effect of group showed that there was not a statistically significant difference in mean psychological safety reported between intervention and control groups. Thus, participation in the escape room improved psychological safety perceptions, but the intervention did not have a substantial effect. These as well as additional findings related to team inputs, team processes, and their implications will be discussed during the lecture.
Escape rooms have been increasingly used as a method used in educational contexts to enhance learning, as well as research contexts to study teams and enhance emergent states like psychological safety (e.g., cohesion, Cohen et al., 2021). They present an opportunity to study teams of varying sizes and compositions and offer an explicit episode to investigate the potential role of team processes in the development of emergent states such as psychological safety. Escape rooms have additionally been posited as a potential method to enhance psychological safety, on the basis that they provide a fun and engaging task without real work-related consequences (such as risk to patient life in medical teams; Willis et al., 2023).
The present study utilized a between-subjects, pre- to post-test design to assess whether participation in an escape room (within subjects, pre- to post-test) and a short intervention aimed to enhance team processes used during the escape room (between subjects, intervention/control) could improve psychological safety perceptions in undergraduate medical and PA students undergoing emergency medicine clerkship rotations. Additional study variables included team inputs of familiarity and perceived diversity, as well as perceptions and observed rate of team process behaviors [corresponding to the Mathieu et al. (2020) taxonomy survey] exhibited during the escape room. All scales achieved acceptable reliability in terms of internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha >.7) or inter-rater reliability (Cohen’s and Fleiss Kappa >.7) as applicable.
Seventy-three students participated in the escape room and completed the associated surveys. A mixed measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedure was performed to assess the effects of the escape room and intervention on psychological safety perceptions. There was not a statistically significant interaction between the intervention and time on psychological safety perceptions. The main effect of time showed a statistically significant difference in mean psychological safety perceptions reported at the different time points, with scores immediately following the escape room higher than before the escape room. The main effect of group showed that there was not a statistically significant difference in mean psychological safety reported between intervention and control groups. Thus, participation in the escape room improved psychological safety perceptions, but the intervention did not have a substantial effect. These as well as additional findings related to team inputs, team processes, and their implications will be discussed during the lecture.
Authors
Event Type
Oral Presentations
TimeTuesday, April 18:52am - 9:15am EDT
LocationPier 9
Simulation and Education (SE)