Why read this article? Because collective performance does not depend solely on team engagement, nor only on psychological safety. It emerges from the balance between the two.
This article shows how leadership directly influences team climate, why some teams drift into anxiety, comfort, or apathy, and how data from Hogan inventories can help leaders, HR directors, and Talent Management professionals better understand the behaviors that shape organizational culture.
You will also discover how to rebalance a team without necessarily undertaking major changes, but by adjusting specific behaviors to strengthen trust, accountability, and sustainable performance.
Team engagement and psychological safety are both influenced by leadership effectiveness. When both are high, a team has a strong chance of performing well. But what happens when a team experiences an imbalance? And how can a leader restore the situation?
In episode 151 of The Science of Personality, Melvyn Payne, Managing Director at Advanced People Strategies — APS —, an authorized Hogan distributor in the United Kingdom, explains how to find the right balance between team engagement and psychological safety.
“In an ideal world, everyone is equal within the team,” explains Melvyn. “Everyone has a voice. Everyone feels comfortable enough to raise their hand when they make 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 display the right balance between engagement and safety. Yet many teams tend to overinvest in one and underinvest in the other, particularly within executive teams where each member is an expert in their own function.
These senior leaders may be more concerned with the security of their position, high-stakes issues, and their reputation than with sharing responsibility for successes and failures.
Team development sessions can reveal how a leader’s behaviors create an environment of balance or imbalance. Drawing on data from Hogan personality assessment, APS began offering a tactical twelve-item questionnaire focused on safety and engagement. This approach was developed from team sessions in which participants seemed reluctant to confront the issues that were holding back performance.
“Hogan focuses not only on how the team works together, but also on individual development situations, where a leader’s individual behavior has an impact,” explains Melvyn.
Many teams struggle to operate with optimal equality and a healthy balance between engagement and psychological safety. The model used by APS to characterize teams can be described as a four-zone grid.
In this zone, the team is likely to feel comfortable expressing opinions, acknowledging failures, innovating, collaborating, taking responsibility, and making progress. Melvyn describes it as a balance between everyone moving in the same direction and having a safe space in which to act along the way.
In this team, members probably feel free to speak openly and make mistakes. However, they do not necessarily hold others accountable for results and may not always focus on achieving the expected objectives.
This team probably shows a strong level of accountability and a strong results orientation, but also high tension, discomfort, or anxiety about how failure will be handled.
In this team, members probably lack both openness and momentum. Melvyn emphasizes that absent leadership can generate apathy within teams.
These zones provide insights into the team as a whole, but individual-level insights are also valuable. Even in teams located in the high-performance zone, some individuals may indicate in the questionnaire that they do not feel comfortable asking questions, for example.
“Even if, on the surface, the collective seems to be functioning well, this becomes an excellent discussion point for the team. How can we help these colleagues feel more comfortable asking questions?” explains Melvyn, adding that results are always anonymized.
Even more than individual team members, leaders have the responsibility to respond to collective data. If an imbalance appears, they must recognize the personality drivers underlying their behaviors and influencing team culture. To do this, Melvyn encourages leaders to develop an in-depth understanding of their Hogan data.
Hogan’s three core personality inventories offer a portrait of how a person is likely to behave at work, including in the way they lead.
The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory — MVPI — describes the values and drivers that motivate behavior from within. The Hogan Personality Inventory — HPI — measures the bright side of personality, meaning everyday personality strengths. The Hogan Development Survey — HDS — measures the dark side of personality, in other words potentially overused strengths that may emerge under stress, pressure, or complacency.
A person’s personality data shows the extent to which they naturally feel safe in a group context and how engaged they tend to be. A leader with a high score on Interpersonal Sensitivity on the HPI will tend to create an environment in which people feel welcome to share their thoughts and feelings.
Conversely, high scores on the HDS scales Excitable, Skeptical, and Mischievous may indicate a leader who creates an environment in which openness could lead to negative consequences.
One indicator of engagement lies in the degree of alignment between a person’s MVPI values and the company’s values: the stronger the alignment, the more likely engagement is to be high. A person with a high score on Ambition on the HPI will tend to show strong engagement, although this is not universal. Anyone can become disengaged, just as anyone can feel unsafe.
When team engagement is high and psychological safety is low, the team operates in the anxiety zone. This anxiety may be an implicit cause of behavior.
For example, one of the APS questionnaire items states: “I am willing to assert my point of view to obtain the best outcome.” A person who tends to be assertive would probably have higher scores on Ambition and Sociability on the HPI. A person with lower scores on Ambition and Sociability might also be willing to express their opinion, but feel uncomfortable doing so.
In this type of team, even a person with a high score on Ambition on the HPI may fear making mistakes. Melvyn observes that members of executive teams sometimes do not want to participate in team development sessions because they are afraid of trying something new and failing. A highly ambitious person who also has a high score on Power on the MVPI might feel anxious if they are not certain they can win.
A leader with high scores on Bold or Colorful on the HDS might easily share their thoughts and emotions without hesitation, while failing to perceive the effect of their behavior on others.
Melvyn tells the story of a team session in which members said they did not feel comfortable speaking up or asking questions without feeling stupid. The leader’s Hogan data showed a risk of interrupting others and dominating the team. Immediately after the session ended, the leader reverted to familiar and unhelpful behavioral patterns, telling a team member: “Never say that to me again.”
This example illustrates how a leader’s derailing tendencies directly influence team culture.
When psychological safety is high and team engagement is low, the team operates in the comfort zone.
Melvyn identifies the MVPI values Affiliation and Altruism as being linked to caring for others and cooperating. A high score on Interpersonal Sensitivity on the HPI is also linked to the ability to get along well with others.
On the dark side of personality, the HDS scales Cautious, Dutiful, and Leisurely can influence a person’s desire to preserve relationships at the expense of engagement — in other words, to ignore the elephant in the room.
Melvyn describes a senior HR team with high scores on Altruism and Affiliation on the MVPI, which prioritized a high level of psychological safety. Leaders outside the team expected the HR team to challenge their thinking about business and strategy, while also delivering HR solutions.
Within the team itself, members were highly engaged and clear about expectations, but they paid less attention to their reputation in the wider organization.
“What people expected from them went far beyond what they thought others expected. It is all about reputation, perception, and the reality experienced by others,” explains Melvyn.
Rebalancing a team rarely requires major changes. Often, a leader needs to adapt specific behaviors to strengthen accountability or trust. This work begins by recognizing the gaps between how leaders see themselves and how others perceive them — in other words, between their identity and their reputation.
“According to Hogan, the principle is to create this self-awareness around how we are perceived,” explains Melvyn. “Hogan always suggests that leaders ask themselves how to create feedback loops to calibrate how behavior actually shows up.”
Teams also need this rebalancing process. A psychologically safe team that does not hold itself accountable for results can learn to ask sharper questions that stimulate improvement.
Even though engagement and safety can vary significantly from one team to another, the key lies in alignment. “For teams, do we have a shared, coherent approach that fits our context?” asks Melvyn. What matters is that everyone agrees on the method from the outset and dares to point out when that method stops working.
Balance is not a fixed state, but an evolving practice. As leadership effectiveness, team dynamics, and ways of working change, the relationship between team engagement and psychological safety also evolves.
High-performing teams continue to ask two questions to maintain this balance: what is working well, and where should we now focus our attention?
The balance between team engagement and psychological safety lies at the heart of sustainable leadership. Too much safety without sufficient challenge can create a comfort zone. Too much challenge without safety can create anxiety. And when both are low, apathy threatens collective performance.
Personality assessment, when used with method and discernment, offers leaders, HR directors, and Talent Management professionals a powerful lever for understanding the behaviors that shape organizational culture. Hogan inventories help illuminate individual drivers, visible strengths, derailing risks, and their impact on teams.
Within an assessment and development, coaching and support, and team transformation approach, this data helps create feedback loops, strengthen shared accountability, and build work environments where trust supports high standards.
This is where sustainable performance lies: in leaders’ ability to align engagement, psychological safety, skills development, and HR strategy in order to fully unlock the leadership potential of individuals and organizations.
Thank you, everyone.
