RDEL #103: How does psychological safety impact performance in agile development teams?
Research shows that strong relationships and psychological safety fuel learning and performance in large-scale agile teams
Welcome back to Research-Driven Engineering Leadership. Each week, we pose an interesting topic in engineering leadership, and apply the latest research in the field to drive to an answer.
Agile at scale is built on coordination—but sustained performance depends on trust. While teams may follow the same stand ups, backlogs, and sprints, what often differentiates the high performers is their ability to surface failures, reflect openly, and improve together. This week we ask: How does psychological safety impact the success of agile software teams?
The context
Agile at scale is no longer novel. Most modern engineering organizations have adopted frameworks like SAFe or LeSS to coordinate work across multiple teams and functions. But even with the right ceremonies and tools in place, many teams struggle with the human side of scale: maintaining trust, surfacing problems early, and learning quickly from mistakes.
In large-scale agile environments, where teams are often distributed and interdependent, the social dynamics behind high performance—like psychological safety and strong peer relationships—can quietly erode. And when they do, so does a team’s ability to reflect, adapt, and improve. This study explores what happens when teams invest in those dynamics, and how they translate into measurable performance outcomes.
The research
To investigate how team dynamics influence performance in large-scale agile environments, researchers surveyed 167 software professionals across Swedish tech companies practicing agile methods. They tested a conceptual model using structural equation modeling to explore the relationships between high-quality relationships, psychological safety, learning from failures, and team performance.
Key findings:
High-quality relationships significantly improve psychological safety.
Teams with shared goals, mutual respect, and shared knowledge were more likely to report feeling safe to speak up.High-quality relationships also directly improve learning from failures.
The strongest path in the model showed that when relationships are strong, teams are more likely to learn from mistakes.
Psychological safety boosts learning from failures.
Teams with a safe environment were more open to discussing mistakes and adapting.
Learning from failures improves team performance.
Teams that reflect and adapt perform better—confirming the link between learning culture and delivery.
The application
This study shows that strong relationships and psychological safety are critical infrastructure for learning and high performance in large-scale agile teams. Without them, teams avoid risk, repeat mistakes, and underperform. With them, teams adapt, collaborate, and grow.
Here’s how engineering leaders can apply this research to support their team performance:
Invest in relationships as part of agile practice.
Encourage shared goals, cross-team respect, and knowledge-sharing rituals—these are not just cultural wins, but performance drivers.
Make psychological safety visible and actionable.
Run retros that reward vulnerability, train managers to model openness, and make it safe to surface risks before they become blockers.
Turn failure into a team-level learning habit.
Treat retros, incident reviews, and postmortems as spaces for collective reflection—not individual fault-finding. (Note: we previously covered how teams can run more effective retros here)
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Happy Research Tuesday,
Lizzie