How Teams Build Better Cultures

There's a paradox at the heart of how we think about workplace culture. We treat it as something that happens to us - an invisible force that shapes our behavior and experience. Yet culture is fundamentally participatory, built through countless daily interactions between people.

This tension between culture as environment and culture as collective action came into sharp focus for me while reviewing some fascinating recent research on psychological safety in software development teams. The findings offer insights that extend far beyond tech, illuminating how any group can deliberately craft the conditions for better collaboration.

A comprehensive study by Alami et al. published in Information and Software Technology found that psychological safety – that crucial sense that you can take interpersonal risks without facing rejection or punishment – emerges from what they call, "strategies owned by different roles in the organization." In other words, safety isn't granted from above but co-created through specific behaviors at every level.

"Psychological safety is institutionalized and sustained by strategies owned by different roles in the organization," the researchers write. "Openness and no blame are part of the DNA shaping psychological safety."

What's particularly striking is how this maps onto recent findings about team culture more broadly. Another study examining health plan teams found that successful cultures required both "top-down" and "bottom-up" engagement. As Bradley Gilbert puts it in his research:

"Building a psychologically safe work environment is not, by all means, a one-off process; it is a continuous endeavor where all parties contribute."

The key insight across this research is that high-performing cultures emerge from the interplay of multiple levels:

• Leadership has to actively demonstrate the values they espouse. It's not enough to proclaim psychological safety - leaders need to "walk the talk" by showing vulnerability, admitting mistakes, and visibly supporting team members who take risks.
• Teams need mechanisms for collective decision-making and shared accountability. The research shows that when teams make decisions collaboratively, it reinforces the sense that everyone's voice matters.
• Individuals must consistently choose behaviors that build trust – being open to feedback, avoiding blame, and supporting colleagues. These individual actions compound over time to shape the broader culture.

What this means for anyone trying to influence their team's culture is both empowering and challenging. You can't simply mandate psychological safety or decree an innovative culture into existence. But you can deliberately practice and encourage the specific behaviors that research shows lead to better outcomes.

This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of culture change. It's not about grand transformational initiatives, but rather the steady accumulation of small actions - choosing to respond to a mistake with curiosity rather than criticism, making space in meetings for dissenting views, demonstrating care for colleagues as whole people.

The research suggests that when enough people in an organization consistently make these choices, it creates a kind of virtuous cycle. As Alami's team found, "psychological safety materializes in agile teams when different actors weigh in their support, buy-in and embrace the core values of safety."

This points to perhaps the most important truth about workplace culture: while we can't control it entirely, we're all constantly shaping it through our choices. The question isn't whether you're influencing your team's culture, but how intentionally you're doing so.

For managers, this means modeling the behaviors you want to see and creating structures that reinforce them. For individual contributors, it means recognizing that your daily interactions are literally building your team's culture, one micro-decision at a time.

The encouraging message from the research is that better cultures are possible – not through top-down mandates or wishful thinking, but through the deliberate, collective effort of people at all levels choosing behaviors that build psychological safety, trust, and healthy collaboration.

Culture may not be something that simply happens to us. But it is something we're all creating together, whether we realize it or not. The choice is whether we do so intentionally, guided by evidence about what works, or let it emerge haphazardly from unexamined habits and reactions.

The research points to a better path. It's up to us to walk it.