Abstract
Bisbey et al. (2025) propose that trust and psychological safety function as resource passageways: emergent states that enable teams to “recognize the resources brought by individual team members and see them as valuable” (p. 7), thereby building team resilience capacity. Their longitudinal data support this mechanism. Between teams, psychological safety strongly predicted resilience capacity (B = 0.76, p < .001), as did trust (B = 0.31, p = .038). Teams with high resilience capacity showed minimal performance decrements under severe adversity (B = −0.02, p = .95), while low-capacity teams suffered significantly (B = −0.92, p = .008). The authors appropriately call for research examining “how team resilience effects operate in long-term teams or more diverse teams” (p. 26) and ask explicitly, “what role does team diversity play?” (Table 3, Question 9). This commentary extends their resource passageway logic by proposing that recognition gaps, systematic failures to perceive certain members’ resources as valuable, function as an additional passageway constraint that becomes visible in diverse teams.
Bisbey et al.’s model assumes that when passageways are open (high trust, high psychological safety), resources flow. Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth framework suggests a boundary condition: some resources may go unrecognized even when passageways are open, because they take forms unfamiliar to those doing the recognizing. In diverse teams, members who have navigated structural barriers possess what Yosso terms navigational capital, skills for maneuvering within institutions designed without one’s community in mind, including threat recognition, resource identification under constraint, and persistence despite systemic setbacks. Within Bisbey et al.’s conservation of resources (COR) framework, navigational capital constitutes human capital resources relevant to team resilience. The question is whether trust and psychological safety, the passageways Bisbey et al. identify, are sufficient for teams to recognize and access this form of resource. Drawing on 17 years supporting internationally educated professionals through credential recognition processes, I have observed that resources acquired in contexts unfamiliar to evaluators often remain invisible regardless of the openness of formal channels.
This observation generates a proposition extending Bisbey et al.’s model: Recognition gaps moderate the relationship between emergent states and resource integration, such that trust and psychological safety more strongly predict resilience capacity when team members’ resources take forms familiar to teammates than when resources take unfamiliar forms. In Bisbey et al.'s MBA consulting teams (83.63% men, 68.42% White), resources likely took relatively familiar forms across members, making recognition gaps less salient. In teams where members bring resources developed through navigating different institutional contexts, recognition gaps may constrain resource integration even when trust and psychological safety are high. The passageway is open, but the resource fails to register as valuable upon arrival.
A linked extension concerns adversity measurement. Bisbey et al. operationalized adversity as “anything that threatened getting work done as well or as efficient as it could be” (p. 10), capturing episodic setbacks teams collectively recognize. This operationalization, appropriate for consulting project challenges, overlooks chronic, identity-based adversity that some members navigate continuously while others remain unaware. A second proposition follows: Adversity that is individually experienced yet collectively invisible contributes to within-team variance in resilience-relevant resources without appearing in team-level adversity measures. Members managing ongoing identity-based challenges (working harder to have competence recognized, self-presentation management, belonging uncertainty) develop adversity-relevant expertise that current measures would miss. Extending Bisbey et al.'s adversity measure to include items assessing chronic individual-level challenges would enable testing whether individually-experienced adversity predicts individual contributions to team resilience capacity.
Finally, Bisbey et al.'s multilevel modeling examines between-team and within-team variance in emergent states, but diverse teams may exhibit a specific pattern warranting attention: dispersion in psychological safety perceptions. A third proposition: Within-team dispersion in psychological safety, where some members feel safe while others feel unsafe, functions as a theoretically distinct signal from mean psychological safety levels, with implications for whose resources are integrated into team resilience capacity. High-dispersion teams may show adequate mean psychological safety while systematically excluding certain members’ contributions. Bisbey et al.’s analytical approach could be extended by examining dispersion as a predictor, testing whether teams with equivalent mean psychological safety but different dispersion patterns show different resilience capacity outcomes.
These propositions may illuminate Bisbey et al.’s intriguing finding that between-team psychological safety predicted lower performance (B = −0.91, p = .040). The authors suggest psychologically safe teams might have a “more relaxed climate” (p. 23). An alternative consistent with the recognition gap framework: in their specific setting (MBA consulting teams, instructor-evaluated deliverables), psychological safety may have enabled members to surface concerns that slowed deliverable completion while building capacity beyond what instructor ratings captured. This interpretation is necessarily speculative given available data, but it suggests a clear research direction: examining whether the psychological safety-performance relationship is moderated by team diversity, with the prediction that in diverse teams, psychological safety enables surfacing of perspectives that create short-term friction while enhancing long-term team learning.
Bisbey et al. demonstrate that trust and psychological safety create resource passageways supporting team resilience capacity. This commentary proposes recognition gaps as an additional passageway constraint that becomes visible when extending their framework to diverse teams, as they invite. Three testable propositions follow from integrating community cultural wealth with their COR logic: that recognition gaps moderate emergent state effects on resource integration, that individually-experienced adversity contributes unmeasured variance, and that dispersion in psychological safety signals whose resources are integrated. Bisbey et al.’s Table 3 research agenda provide an ideal foundation for these extensions. Their question about team diversity can be answered, in part, by examining whether diverse teams show different resilience patterns and whether the resource passageway mechanism operates equivalently for members whose resources take unfamiliar forms.
