How to Foster Psychological Safety When AI Erodes Trust on Your Team

There may be something unsettling happening on your team. Despite expected productivity gains from integrating AI tools, overall team performance appears to be declining. People are starting to second-guess themselves, and trust is eroding in ways that are hard to pinpoint.

Consider this hypothetical scenario: Your marketing team uses a gen AI tool to analyze campaign performance. The AI confidently recommends reallocating budget based on what appears to be solid data analysis. But it turns out the recommendation is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of your customer segments. The campaign fails, budgets are wasted and suddenly everyone on the team is questioning not just the AI’s future recommendations, but their own ability to evaluate them.

As organizations rapidly integrate AI into their workflows, leaders are discovering that the challenges it brings aren’t just technical—they’re fundamentally about team dynamics, as well. The same AI tools that promise to enhance productivity can create predictable patterns of team dysfunction that mirror classic organizational behavior problems. Consider the rise in “workslop:" AI-generated output that fails to move a project forward and dumps extra cognitive and emotional labor on colleagues who must fix or redo it. The result is not only harm to productivity but damaged trust in coworkers.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.