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The Psychology Behind Culture

Psychological Safety​

A key inspiration of the DORA research is the concept of "psychological safety" which is defined as:

"a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes" - Prof. Amy Edmondson

Ideally, software engineering is driven by evidence, objective reasoning, and honest feedback. In practice, however, engineering discussions are rarely purely rational. They are also shaped by social dynamics, emotions, power structures, and the perceived consequences of being wrong.

When psychological safety is low, people may engage in impression management. They consciously or unconsciously try to shape how others perceive them to protect their reputation, status, or position. This can manifest in several ways (source):

  • Fear of failure
  • Reluctance to ask for help
  • Risk avoidance
  • Tendency to agree with the boss
  • Tendency to share successes & hide problems
  • The instinct to point fingers & divert blame
  • Complacency and disengagement

These behaviors can be understood as forms of self-protection. When people perceive that speaking up could lead to humiliation, punishment, or reputational damage, remaining silent or managing appearances can seem like the rational choice. The problem is not necessarily that individuals lack integrity or courage; it is that the environment may reward self-protection over openness.

But what protects individuals in the short term can harm the organization in the long term. When people prioritize avoiding personal consequences over sharing what they know, the side effects are severe:

  • Problems surface too late
  • Metrics lose their integrity
  • Information sharing becomes a political decision
  • Collective learning becomes difficult
  • Mental health declines (stress, depression, burnout)

The important lesson for organizations is: Psychological safety is not merely a matter of employee well-being. It is a prerequisite for collective learning and decision-making.

Psychological safety should also not be mistaken with comfort or employee well-being. It actually enables people to have difficult discussions that can be very uncomfortable. People will be okay with temporary discomfort if the broader environment is perceived as safe.

Sense of Agency​

Psychological safety alone does not explain culture. It is rather one aspect of an even deeper principle: Agency.

Around 2012 Google's HR department launched a study code-named "Project Aristotle". The goal was to figure out the secrets that make a team at Google effective. They started to look into individual traits of people and how people were mixed together as teams. But they eventually realized that individual traits and the team composition were not as important as the collective dynamics within the team regardless of their team members. Their research identified the top five relevant team dynamics that make teams effective:

  1. Psychological Safety: Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other
  2. Dependability: Team members get things done on time and meet a high bar for excellence
  3. Structure and Clarity: Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals
  4. Meaning: Work is personally important to team members
  5. Impact: Team members think their work matters and creates change

The astonishing result of this study is that individual traits that we would typically assume to be quite important for working in a tech company such as skill level, job experience or education are actually less important than these dynamics. They also sound rather vague and difficult to measure. Why did they win?

Interestingly, all five dynamics mirror a fundamental psychological mechanism that seems to shine through here: The human need to experience a sense of agency. People need to feel like they have an impact on work that is meaningful to them while working within clear, safe and dependable structures.

Human cognition is driven by agency. In a world of overwhelming complexity and only limited cognitive resources, humans must select what is relevant to them and filter out the rest. What is relevant is determined by how it contributes to our agency.

If we want to harness the cognitive capacity of humans for a work project, we need to understand what agency means for them and how structures and processes affect it. The goal should be that people engage with the project because they are subconsciously convinced that it is in their own best interest. It has to present itself as a viable path to agency for them.