What’s the crucial element for interdisciplinary teamwork? Psychological safety

You can’t have interdisciplinary collaboration without psychological safety. Here’s why.

In today’s complex and interconnected world, interdisciplinary teamwork is essential for innovation to addressing complex societal challenges. Psychological safety is crucial. As Harvard Business School academic Amy Edmondson’s extensive research has revealed, psychological safety fosters team climates where members feel confident to speak up, externalise their knowledge and voice disagreement without fear of being judged or cast out. 

• Four things to consider to create a safe and inspiring interdisciplinary learning environment
• How to lay the groundwork for interdisciplinarity in students
• Practical strategies for overcoming challenges in interdisciplinary project-based learning

This kind of radical openness is the key to interdisciplinary collaboration, which relies on team members being willing to share, deliberate and integrate knowledge from diverse domains. By fostering psychological safety, educators can help students feel more comfortable expressing their thoughts and engaging in constructive dialogue, leading to more innovative and effective problem-solving.

The challenge of psychologically safe collaboration online 

Establishing psychological safety is not easy at the best of times, but online learning environments throw up additional barriers that can jeopardise interdisciplinary exchange. Our research found that a lack of in-person interaction, increased self-consciousness online, technical issues, poor interpersonal rapport and difficulty in coordinating tasks across a dispersed team can work against the establishment of trust and open communication.

The good news is that a selection of key strategies can help educators scaffold genuine interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and innovation. Using University of Sydney researchers Lucila Carvahlo and Peter Goodyear’s model of teaching as service design to structure our analysis, we distinguished specific social, epistemic and set design considerations that support psychological safety in online student teams. Here’s how to achieve interdisciplinarity by designing for psychological safety online:

Get to know each other

Students can feel more vulnerable and reluctant to engage openly online. To encourage students to make secure interpersonal connections, dedicate time and opportunities for students to establish rapport with each other – and you! This is especially important during the early phases of team formation. 

• Icebreakers and fun activities: designing informal activities into the learning experience is not a waste of time; it’s integral to the establishment of supportive team bonds. Start with light-hearted activities like online dress-ups or a pet show-and-tell to break the ice and reduce hierarchical barriers.
• Establish team norms: balance informality with formal expectations. Set clear guidelines for online interactions, such as mandatory webcam use and respectful communication. Ask students to negotiate a team charter to formalise their own group norms.

Encourage open and honest communication

To catalyse discussion, lead by example. Be inquisitive, show the limits to your own understanding and proactively invite alternative perspectives.

• Model openness: show that you are comfortable with your own fallibility – not knowing something is okay, even for the teacher! Demonstrate curiosity through exploratory questioning, using active listening techniques and encouraging equal participation through conversational turn-taking.
• Conflict resolution training: cognitive conflict is a feature of interdisciplinary collaboration – not a bug. Provide students with tools and strategies to handle conflicts productively. Teach them to distinguish between task-related disagreements and personal conflicts.

Design challenging tasks that invite diverse contributions

By their very nature, real-world problems demand contributions across disciplinary boundaries. Setting up learning activities and assessments around complex challenges gives students tacit permission to venture outside of their epistemic comfort zone and experiment with new perspectives.

• Assign projects that require diverse contributions: make the focal challenge big and multifaceted enough that it cannot be completed by a single person. This encourages students to collaborate and integrate different perspectives.
• Provide success criteria (e.g., marking rubrics) that reinforce the necessity of interdisciplinary cooperation and reward evidence of it.
• Assessment design: ensure that group assignments are a significant part of the final grade to motivate students to invest in effective teamwork.

Provide continuous support and feedback

Venturing across unfamiliar disciplinary territory to tackle a complex challenge can feel risky. And novice interdisciplinarians will not automatically trust the process. We found that students highly value regular feedback from their instructor, whose support functions as a safety net, without impinging on the team’s independence and autonomy.

• Regular check-ins: schedule frequent check-ins with teams to provide guidance and address any emerging issues. Use these sessions to reinforce the importance of collaboration, deliberation and mutual support.
• Iterative feedback: offer ongoing feedback to normalise constructive failure and encourage revision of ideas. This helps students become more resilient and open to change.

Make the learning platform as invisible as possible

Complex problems and interdisciplinary collaboration are challenging enough without added confusion around learning resources, assessments or basic technical glitches.

• Have your tech tools ready: as the instructor, you can make online interaction as seamless as possible by getting up to speed with your chosen videoconferencing platform, including features such as breakout rooms and activity monitoring. Make sure all online learning resources are user-friendly and easily navigable.
• Collaboration sessions: schedule frequent group work as part of timetabled classes to underscore the importance of regular, synchronous collaboration and help students make this a routine.
• Staying in touch: encourage teams to use an instant messaging app of their choice for a more spontaneous, relaxed communication channel.

Cultivating psychological safety should be a key component in teaching for interdisciplinarity, but it requires deliberate instructional design and continuous support – especially in online teaching and learning. By facilitating interpersonal connections, encouraging open communication, designing collaborative tasks and providing regular feedback, educators can create a safe and effective learning environment. These strategies not only enhance teamwork but also prepare students for real-world collaboration and problem-solving.

Helena Robinson is senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney and Fabian Held is senior interdisciplinarity lecturer at the University of Sydney. 

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