Supporting psychological safety in teamwork – in which ways do engineering students feel safe doing creativity–focused interventions in a PBL environment?

We explore which aspects of creativity-focused interventions in a PBL setting first-year students consider meaningful for psychological safety. Four significantly different collective opinions were identified among 27 students through Q-factor analysis: 1) individual efforts within teamwork; 2) individual confidence within teamwork; 3) team management and performance; and 4) teamwork for idea building. Participants reported contradictory but overlapping perceptions of diverse psychological safety aspects during team creativity development. The results call for more structured educational interventions scaffolding students to link creativity exercises with reflections on psychological safety, and progressive evaluation to better observe students’ psychological safety feelings during team creativity development.