兰德-人际风险与组织回报-评估美国国土安全部的心理安全和人员结果（英）

Interpersonal Risk and Organizational RewardAssessing Psychological Safety and Personnel Outcomes in the U.S. Department of Homeland SecurityNATHAN THOMPSONThis document was submitted as a dissertation in March 2025 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Frederick S. Pardee Ph.D. in Policy Analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of Charles Goldman (chair), Thomas Trail, David Luckey, and Benjamin Storey (external reader).Funding for this dissertation was provided by the Anne and James Rothenberg Dissertation Award and the Pardee Dissertation Award.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.It is, indeed, natural that men who are nourished in a climate of fear should degenerate into a servile condition of soul and become fearful of every manly and strenuous act.- Thomas Aquinas, On KingshipFor more information on this publication, visit www.rand.org/t/RGSDA4279-1.About the RAND School of Public PolicyThe RAND School of Public Policy has specialized in graduate-level policy education since its founding in 1970. The RAND School is home to the Frederick S. Pardee Ph.D. in Policy Analysis, which is the original public policy Ph.D. program in the United States and the only Ph.D. program based at an independent public policy research organization. To learn more about the RAND School of Public Policy, visit www.rand.edu.Published in 2025 by the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. is a registered trademark.iii Abstract United States federal agencies bear an enormous range of responsibilities in their work to serve the American people, making personnel metrics such as job satisfaction, team performance, and retention key considerations for agency leaders. However, in the past two decades, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has consistently struggled in its personnel management efforts. Literature primarily focused on private sector institutions has identified psychological safety, a construct that examines the extent to which employees can report errors, voice dissent, and take professional interpersonal risks without fear of retribution, as a meaningful driver of improved employee outcomes. This dissertation explores the construct of psychological safety as an interpersonal dynamic that quietly influences outcomes of interest at DHS, a public sector institution with a high-stakes national security mission. Regression analysis, semi-structured interviews, and exploratory factor analysis are utilized, ultimately finding psychological safety to have universally significant, positive associations with DHS personnel outcomes, and identifying it as a valuable workplace dynamic for consideration in personnel management improvement efforts. These findings hold for federal personnel working in the six largest federal agencies. More broadly, interpersonal dynamics are found to have more significant associations with team work quality evaluation