Immersive Tech, Workplace Belonging & Psychological Safety: Highlights from the Inaugural SIER Research Workshop

At the first Stanford Initiative for Entrepreneurs’ Resilience & Well-Being (SIER) research workshop last month, researcher Fabian Tingelhoff kicked off a trio of presentations from STVP by sharing the World Health Organization’s definition of mental health:

Mental health is a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community. 

This definition, he pointed out, illustrates the importance of mental health for entrepreneurs – innovators who are constantly dealing with different stressors as they aim to learn and work collaboratively, all to discern how to add value to society. 

Tingelhoff, a visiting student researcher, presented alongside PhD students Christopher Flowers and Yulia Venichenko, all of whom are working with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), part of the department of Management Science & Engineering. 

“Together, these research projects analyze resilience and well-being at three levels – the individual, the team, and the leadership,” explained Professor and STVP Faculty Director Riitta Katila. “Fabian looks at how technology helps individuals cope with stress, while Chris looks at how team interactions impact workers’ stress and sense of belonging. Finally, Yulia explores how leaders who emphasize psychological safety influence the effectiveness and adaptability of their organizations.” 

Virtual reality and mental well-being

Tingelhoff presented on immersive mediation and the application of VR (virtual reality) to address stress and mental health, and whether VR offers benefits beyond the text-based and auditive meditation apps currently offered. Can VR decouple you from a stressful situation and put you in a different environment?

Through a three-study design, Tingelhoff and his team explored VR meditation app designs via company interviews, talked with users to understand usage patterns and preferences, and conducted a user-choice experiment to understand what design aspects led to adoption.

The team found that immersive meditation had little effect on participants when they were in a positive emotional state, but when there was existing stress and negative emotion, the immersive experience had a significant impact on participants’ state of mind. Participants reported physical benefits (lower pulse, better sleep, muscle relaxation) as well as psychological benefits, mental clarity, balance, and lower stress. Said a participant who was accustomed to audio meditations: “Usually I am struggling quite a lot to structure all my thoughts, but after these [VR], it was so much easier.”

Tingelhoff’s presentation came out of a paper that explores technology design methods that balance the tension inherent in tech-driven meditation tools: tech tools use stimuli to create a meditative mindset, yet it is often the act of removing stimuli that’s needed to create stillness and to build introspection.

Belonging and workplace well-being

STVP PhD student Christopher Flowers shared his ongoing research on how belonging and social fit shape workplace well-being. Social connection is a psychological resource that can be used to support entrepreneurial resilience and navigate stressful situations, and we shouldn’t assume that all entrepreneurs or startup employees, even in the same organization, have the same experiences of belonging.

Research shows that belonging is an innate human need with real benefits: increased motivation, job satisfaction, helpfulness within teams, and persistence in problem solving. When the need for belonging is not met, it impacts everything from job performance, to seeking information or support from coworkers, to self-defeating behavior.

Flowers’ research examines what constitutes positive social interaction in tech, where workplace policies and practices may narrowly reflect the perspectives and needs of today’s workforce, and workers interacting across group boundaries may face challenges with relationship formation, employment discrimination, and work group inclusion. Through more than 60 interviews with White and Black tech workers at more than 60 companies, Flowers found that interpersonal safety cues – stimuli derived from interpersonal interaction that produce signals to convey safety and inform expectations of future interactions – are defined differently for Black vs. White tech workers. While White workers report sharing hobbies and being friendly as safety cues, Black workers identified work-related cues as signaling belonging, such as being in sync on projects and being advocated for. 

In this and subsequent research (his dissertation focuses on social well-being and remote work) Flowers is developing an understanding of how diverse entrepreneurs make sense of their interactions with others who may be dissimilar to them. He will share more of his findings in Copenhagen in July at the Academy of Management Meetings, the premier conference in the field of organizations.

Leadership and organizational well-being

Yulia Venichenko wrapped up the session sharing her early research on stress and psychological safety in the context of entrepreneurship. Her research explores such questions as: How do psychological safety and fear-driven leadership influence a startup team’s performance?  And, how might fear-driven leadership increase worker execution speed in the short term and reduce the ability of workers to adapt in the long term?

Psychological safety, Venichenko has found, is widely viewed as a performance enhancer – but it doesn’t always help. She’s exploring “the paradox of psychological safety,” where safety can foster openness, learning, and risk-taking but, when unbalanced, it can reduce execution tempo and delay adaptation. Leadership styles set the tone and play a critical role in whether teams leverage psychological safety for innovation or rely on fear-driven leadership for execution. Venichenko’s research looks to fill current study gaps: most studies focus on the impact of psychological safety on team effectiveness but not on adaptability, and the role of leadership style in shaping these processes is unclear.

In her ongoing investigation, Venichenko is collecting data on startup funding trends, leadership transitions, and pivot frequency and conducting interviews with startup founders to assess leadership practices.

SIER’s first research workshop as a whole explored how the entrepreneurial journey affects the health and well-being of founders, with presentations by STVP researchers as well as the Stanford Mussallem Center for Biodesign’s inaugural SIER fellows, Anastasia Ntracha and Andréas Ward (more details on their research will be shared at a later date). Alan Yeung, MD, the Li Ka Shing Professor in Cardiology, and Chloe Yeung, SIER program coordinator, gave introductory remarks, and Geoffrey Tabin, MD, the Fairweather Foundation Professor of Ophthalmology and Global Medicine, presented “Impossible Dreams – The first ascent on the east face of Mount Everest and the eradication of global blindness: A case study of true resilience.” 

SIER is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Stanford Biodesign and STVP, made possible through a generous donation from the Li Ka Shing Foundation.