Building a Workplace-Based Learning Culture: The “Receiver's” Perspective on Speaking Up

Abstract

Nurturing psychological safety has become a vital antidote to the psychological depletion driving clinicians from healthcare. How to support the clinician's voice, the question at the heart of this study, has never been more important. Here, we explore a hidden aspect of speaking up conversations, how “receivers” experience the dialog. If, when, and how clinicians take in clinically relevant concerns from others is crucial to patient safety. Yet we know little about how different forms of speaking up impact the receiver of the message. We found that receivers of the same message may respond quite differently depending on their professional identity, context, attributions they made, and how the message was phrased. Our findings suggest several actionable practices: (1) Shift the focus of speaking up to training the receiver; (2) frame speaking up as a shared accomplishment; (3) co-create contexts of shared accountability between the speaker and the receiver.