Learning is a process that brings together personal and environmental experiences
and influences for acquiring and enriching one’s knowledge – it also modifies our skills,
values, attitudes, behaviour and world views (Baartman and de Bruijn, 2011). Given
that Psychological Safety is defined as the extent to which people feel safe to express
themselves and take interpersonal risk, the definition for learning and the associated
theories clearly sets the ground work to critically evaluate within the parameters of this
study, the factors that help create a psychologically safe environment that enables
learning to take place. Behaviourism promotes a change in behaviour as a direct
response to the stimuli perceived and observed from the environment. A response is
either encouraged or discourage depending on the stimuli perceived (Foard and
Kemler, 1984). Skinner, another behaviourist in his variant of behaviourism “operant
conditioning” proposes rewarding the right parts of a complex behaviour reinforces
that behaviour (Castellanos, 2009). The study will be looking at how psychological
safety is reinforced with the right response from the data gathered from respondents
and how it directly affects learning