Team Psychological Safety in Real Teams - Country Comparisons

At a glance

Across seven country comparisons drawn from a database of 503 teams in sixteen countries, the most important finding is that the seven elements show what the country Team Psychological Safety (TPS) average cannot. Overall TPS scores cluster tightly across countries. The detail beneath that country TPS average — which specific element is high or low, how spread out the teams are, what words members use to describe their teams — is where country specifics actually show up.

Three things stood out across the comparisons we ran:

First, how widely each country's teams spread around its own average matters at least as much as the country TPS average. The Netherlands clusters its teams tightly; Brazil spreads them widely; Russia sits in the upper-middle of the scale without producing the share of high-average TPS teams seen elsewhere.

Second, differences between countries show up most clearly when looking at the seven elements. Some countries have a broad positive lean across multiple elements. One country has a broadly negative pattern across multiple elements. Some have a single significantly weaker element. One country has a sharply asymmetric profile — one element well below the rest of the world (ROW) and two others well above.

Third, the words members use when answering the survey’s open-ended questions add a layer the numbers cannot reach. Two countries can score similarly on the same element but their teams use qualitatively different language. Verbatim from the country reports illustrates this — acceptance shows up as one word in one country, as a felt request for "more inclusion" in another.