To make the process of innovation successful, organisations have to create an environment that is conducive to this process. This often means they need to undertake an organisational innovation. Two potential useful organisational innovations are to create a psychological safe environment for employees, and to become a high-performance organisation (HPO). Psychological safety – defined as the collective belief that the organisation is a safe place for interpersonal risk-taking – and the HPO – defined as an organisation that achieves results that are better than those of its peer group over a longer period of time – both aim to create a working environment in which it is safe to experiment, make mistakes, give feedback and challenge colleagues and management. In this article, we aim to research the mutual connection between these two ideas, by evaluating whether becoming an HPO will increase the perceived level of psychological safety in the organisation. Using a questionnaire, containing items that measure the HPO and psychological safety levels, administered at two case companies and interviews conducted at one of these companies, we are able to confirm that there is a positive significant relation between the high performance level of an organisation and the perceived psychological safety feeling of its employees.
Keywords: psychological safety, high performance organisations, HPO