The Effect of Psychological Safety on the Performance of Students in Graduate-Level Online Courses

Abstract

Psychological safety underpins high-performing teams in the business world. This study explored the effects of the feeling of psychological safety on graduate students participating in online courses. Psychological safety plays a crucial role in student grade outcomes and even the emotions the student feels in the online classroom environment. A significant difference in grade outcomes was found along with an effect size of 1.813 when comparing final grade outcomes between courses with a felt level of psychological safety to courses that did not reach a level of psychological safety. The presence of psychological safety affected the individual students' feelings by lowering the feeling of sadness and raising the feeling of excitement. Therefore, when creating and delivering online graduate-level courses, it is imperative to use specific teaching behaviors and design strategies to support those behaviors to build psychological safety within the online classroom and foster high performance by students.