Shared rewards and goal interdependence for psychological safety among departments in China

Guoquan CHEN, Dean William TJOSVOLD

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

47 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Psychological safety has been shown to facilitate learning from experience that can help organizations adapt to the changing marketplace. Shared rewards and cooperative, but not competitive and independent, goals may help department members feel supported and able to discuss open-mindedly their experiences, including mistakes, and learn from them. One hundred and twenty five CEOs and 436 executives from 125 companies in China completed measures of psychological safety, goal interdependence, and shared rewards. The results of two structural equation analyses suggest that shared rewards can convince departments that their goals are cooperative and that this conclusion in turn leads to psychological safety. These results were interpreted as suggesting that shared rewards and cooperative goals are important foundations for organizational psychological safety in China and perhaps other countries as well.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)433-452
Number of pages20
JournalAsia Pacific Journal of Management
Volume29
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2012

Funding

The authors appreciate the support of the able research assistants at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. This work has been supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (70625003, 70972024, 70890081, 70272007, 70572005, 7032100), Key Research Project Foundation for Humanity & Social Science (06JJD630013), and PhD Research Foundation (20090002110037), of Chinese Education Committee to the first author, and Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China, (LU3404/05H) to the second author.

Keywords

  • China
  • Goal interdependence
  • Psychological safety
  • Shared rewards

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