Team engagement and psychological safety are two essential dimensions of collective performance. Both are strongly shaped by leadership effectiveness. When the two are high and balanced, teams generally have the conditions they need to collaborate, take the initiative, learn from their mistakes and reach sustainable levels of performance.
But what happens when a team favours one at the expense of the other? Can a strong demand for results generate anxiety? Conversely, can a highly reassuring climate lead people to avoid difficult conversations and dilute accountability?
Drawing on the work of Advanced People Strategies (APS) and on data from the Hogan personality inventories, this article shows how to identify four broad team configurations, high performance, comfort, anxiety and apathy, and how the personality of leaders can contribute to creating them.
For executives, HR directors and talent management professionals, the stakes are strategic: understanding how individual behaviours shape the culture of a team makes it possible to act with far greater precision on leadership, accountability, trust and collective performance.
Both team engagement and psychological safety depend on how effectively a team is led. When the two rise together, a team stands a strong chance of performing.
But what happens when an imbalance appears? And above all, how can a leader put things right?
Episode 151 of the podcast The Science of Personality features Melvyn Payne, who serves as commercial director at Advanced People Strategies (APS), the authorised Hogan distributor in the United Kingdom. He explains how to hold the two in balance.
"In an ideal situation, everyone is on an equal footing within the team," Melvyn explains. "Everyone gets the chance to speak up. Everyone feels comfortable enough to admit a mistake, while still wanting to improve performance."
The environment a leader creates for their team influences both its level of engagement and its sense of safety.
High-performing teams generally show a sound balance between engagement and psychological safety. Yet many teams tend to overinvest in one of these dimensions while neglecting the other.
This pattern can be particularly pronounced within executive committees, where each member is the expert in their own field. These senior leaders may be more concerned with the security of their position, the scale of what is at stake or their personal reputation than with sharing collective responsibility for successes and failures alike.
Team development sessions can bring to light the way leaders' behaviours create a balanced environment or, on the contrary, an unbalanced one.
Building on data from the Hogan personality inventories, APS has begun offering a working questionnaire made up of twelve items covering psychological safety and engagement.
The approach grew out of team development sessions in which participants appeared reluctant to address head-on the problems that were holding back their performance.
Melvyn explains that APS looks not only at the way a team works collectively, but also at individual development situations in which a leader's behaviours have a direct impact on their environment.
Many teams find it difficult to reach an optimal balance between engagement and psychological safety.
The model APS uses to characterise teams distinguishes four zones.
In this configuration, team members are likely to feel comfortable enough to express their opinions and admit their mistakes.
At the same time, they want to innovate, collaborate, take responsibility and make progress.
Melvyn describes this zone as a balance between two dimensions: everyone is moving in the same direction, while having enough of a safe space to act and speak up along the way.
Within this team, people are likely to feel free to speak openly and to make mistakes.
On the other hand, they may find it harder to hold one another accountable for results or to sustain a strong focus on meeting objectives.
The quality of relationships can then become more important than constructive challenge or the demand for performance.
This team is likely to show a high level of accountability and a strong determination to deliver results.
But that demand also comes with considerable tension, discomfort or anxiety about how mistakes and failures will be received.
People may therefore be heavily invested while fearing the consequences of taking a risk or making a mistake.
In this configuration, team members are likely to lack both openness and motivation.
Melvyn points out in particular that absent or insufficiently present leadership can generate apathy within teams.
These four zones provide valuable insight into how a team functions overall, but it is also worth examining what is happening at the individual level.
Even in a team sitting in the high-performance zone, some questionnaire responses may reveal that a few people do not feel comfortable enough to ask questions, for example.
"Even if, collectively, everything looks positive on the surface, that makes an excellent topic of discussion for the team," Melvyn explains. "How can we help those colleagues feel more comfortable when they want to ask questions?"
He makes clear that individual results are always anonymised.
Even more than team members, leaders carry the responsibility of responding to the data gathered.
When an imbalance appears, they need to acknowledge the personality factors underlying some of their behaviours and understand how those behaviours influence the culture of the team.
To do that, Melvyn encourages leaders to deepen their understanding of their own Hogan data.
The three main Hogan personality inventories make it possible to build a picture of how a person is likely to behave in their working environment, particularly when they hold leadership responsibilities.
The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) sets out the values and inner drivers that guide behaviour.
The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) covers what Hogan calls the bright side of personality: the characteristics and strengths a person generally expresses day to day.
The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) looks at the dark side of personality: strengths or behavioural tendencies that may be overused when someone is under stress or pressure, or when they become too comfortable in their environment.
Personality data makes it possible, among other things, to understand how naturally safe a person feels within a group and what level of engagement they are likely to display.
A leader scoring high on Interpersonal Sensitivity on the HPI will generally tend to create an environment in which people feel invited to share their thoughts and feelings.
Conversely, high scores on the Excitable, Skeptical and Mischievous scales of the HDS may characterise a leader who is liable to create an environment in which speaking openly could have negative consequences.
Another potential indicator of engagement lies in how closely a person's MVPI values align with those of their organisation. The stronger that alignment, the more likely engagement is to be high.
Someone scoring high on Ambition on the HPI will also tend to show substantial engagement, although the relationship is not automatic.
In reality, anyone can disengage, just as anyone can end up no longer feeling safe in their working environment.
When team engagement is high but psychological safety is low, the team is operating in the anxiety zone.
That anxiety can be an implicit cause of many behaviours.
One of the items in the APS questionnaire reads, for example:
"I am willing to stand my ground in order to get the best outcome."
Someone who is naturally assertive will probably score higher on Ambition and Sociability on the HPI.
Someone scoring lower on Ambition and Sociability might be just as willing to defend their opinion, while feeling more uncomfortable doing so.
In this kind of team, even a person with a high Ambition score on the HPI may be afraid of making mistakes.
Melvyn finds that some members of leadership teams hesitate to take part in collective development sessions because they dread trying something new and failing.
A highly ambitious person who also scores high on Power on the MVPI may feel anxious if they are not certain they can succeed or "win".
A leader scoring high on the Bold or Colorful scales of the HDS may share their thoughts and feelings easily, without hesitation, while not necessarily noticing the impact of their behaviour on others.
Melvyn recalls a team development session in which several participants had said they did not feel comfortable enough to speak up or ask questions without fearing they would look foolish.
The leader's Hogan data showed a risk of interrupting others and dominating exchanges within the team.
Immediately after the session ended, the leader reverted to familiar and unhelpful behavioural patterns. He told one of his team members:
"Never say that to me again."
This example illustrates very concretely how a leader's derailer tendencies can directly influence the culture of their team.
When psychological safety is high but team engagement is low, the team is operating in the comfort zone.
Melvyn identifies the Affiliation and Altruistic values on the MVPI in particular as being linked to caring for others and seeking cooperation.
A high level of Interpersonal Sensitivity on the HPI is also associated with the ability to maintain good relationships.
On the dark side of personality, the Cautious, Dutiful and Leisurely scales of the HDS can influence a person's desire to preserve relationships, sometimes at the expense of engagement and performance.
Put differently, the wish to maintain harmony can lead people to ignore the elephant in the room.
Melvyn describes the case of a senior HR team scoring high on Altruistic and Affiliation on the MVPI and placing great importance on psychological safety.
Leaders outside that team nonetheless expected the HR function to challenge their thinking about the business and the strategy more robustly, alongside delivering HR solutions.
Within the HR team itself, people were strongly engaged and expectations were clear.
The team, however, paid less attention to its reputation and to how it was perceived across the organisation.
"What others expected of them went well beyond what they thought was expected of them," Melvyn explains. "It is all about reputation, perception and reality as others experience it."
This distinction between intention and perception is central to personality assessment and leadership development: what we think we are conveying is not necessarily what others perceive.
Rebalancing a team rarely calls for radical transformation.
Often, a leader mainly needs to adjust a few specific behaviours in order to strengthen accountability or trust.
The process begins by acknowledging the gaps between how a person sees themselves and how others see them, in other words, between identity and reputation.
Melvyn points out that one of the founding principles of the Hogan approach is precisely to build this self-awareness about how our behaviours are perceived by others.
APS recommends in particular that leaders put in place feedback loops allowing them to check regularly how their behaviours are actually experienced by the people around them at work, and to adjust their approach accordingly.
Teams need this rebalancing process too.
A team with strong psychological safety that holds itself insufficiently accountable for results can learn to ask sharper, more demanding questions in order to drive performance improvement.
Although levels of engagement and psychological safety can vary considerably from one team to another, the key lies in alignment.
Melvyn frames the question this way:
"As a team, have we defined a shared approach that is consistent and suited to our context?"
What matters is that everyone agrees in advance on how to operate, and that team members are able to flag collectively the moment when that approach stops working.
The balance between engagement and psychological safety is never settled once and for all.
It is a practice that keeps evolving.
As leadership effectiveness, team dynamics and ways of working change, the relationship between engagement and psychological safety changes with them.
High-performing teams therefore keep asking themselves two essential questions:
What is working well today?
And:
What should we now be focusing our attention on?
These two simple questions help preserve a team's ability to learn, to adapt and to maintain a balance between trust, accountability and performance.
Psychological safety alone is not enough to produce a high-performing team. Nor are engagement and the demand for results.
Sustainable performance emerges when people can speak up, admit their mistakes, challenge their colleagues, take responsibility and stay committed to shared objectives, all at once.
Seen in this light, personality assessment is a particularly powerful lever for talent management, skills development and HR strategy. Hogan data makes it possible to better understand the behaviours that strengthen or weaken trust, accountability and collective dynamics.
For organisations, the stakes go well beyond individual development: the point is to strengthen leadership potential, to support the transformation of teams and to build an organisational culture capable of reconciling high standards with safety.
By integrating assessment and development, coaching and support, and a thorough reading of personality into their talent management practices, companies can help their leaders gauge the real impact of their behaviours more accurately and create the conditions for more sustainable management.
The objective, then, is not to achieve a perfect balance once and for all, but to develop the collective capacity to observe it, to question it and to readjust it continually.
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: Balancing Team Engagement and Psychological Safety
