Psychological Safety at Work: Definition, Research and Leader Practices

Psychological safety is a shared belief, held by the members of a team, that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. In a psychologically safe team, people ask questions, admit mistakes, raise concerns and disagree with a proposal without expecting to be embarrassed or punished for it. This guide gives the research definition, summarizes the main findings on team learning and speaking up, lists the signs of low psychological safety, and describes what leaders do to build it.

What Is Psychological Safety?

The definition used in most research comes from Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School. In a 1999 article in Administrative Science Quarterly, she introduced the construct of team psychological safety and defined it as "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking" (Edmondson, 1999). Three parts of that definition matter in practice:

• Shared belief. Psychological safety describes a team. It is the climate members experience together, which is why two teams under the same senior leader can differ widely.
• Interpersonal risk. The risks in question are social: looking uninformed after a question, looking incompetent after an error, looking negative after a criticism.
• Safe. Members expect that speaking up will be received as a contribution to the work.

A later review describes psychological safety more broadly as people's perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks in a particular context such as a workplace (Edmondson and Lei, 2014).

Origins of the Concept

According to the review by Edmondson and Lei (2014), psychological safety was first explored by organizational scholars in the 1960s and experienced a renaissance that began in the 1990s. Edmondson's 1999 study is the reference point for that second period. She studied 51 work teams in a manufacturing company and measured antecedents, team processes and outcomes. Team psychological safety was associated with learning behavior, and learning behavior mediated the relation between psychological safety and team performance. Team efficacy, the confidence of a team in its own ability, was not associated with learning behavior once psychological safety was taken into account. The results support a view in which both team structures, such as context support and team leader coaching, and shared beliefs shape team outcomes.

Research Findings on Psychological Safety

Since 1999 the construct has been studied at the level of individuals, groups and organizations. Edmondson and Lei (2014) report that organizational research has identified psychological safety as a critical factor in understanding voice, teamwork, team learning and organizational learning.

• Scale of the evidence. A meta analysis by Frazier and colleagues (2017) drew on 136 independent samples representing over 22,000 individuals and nearly 5,000 groups to examine the antecedents and outcomes of psychological safety, including its relation to task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors over and beyond related concepts such as positive leader relations and work engagement.
• Speaking up. Detert and Burris (2007) studied 3,149 employees and 223 managers in a restaurant chain. Managerial openness was more consistently related to improvement oriented voice than transformational leadership was, and that relation was mediated by employees' perceptions of psychological safety. The authors conclude that leaders play an important part in how employees assess the risks of speaking up.
• Status and inclusion. Nembhard and Edmondson (2006) surveyed teams in 23 neonatal intensive care units. Professional status was positively associated with psychological safety, which means that people lower in the hierarchy felt less safe. Leader inclusiveness, defined as words and deeds by leaders that invite and appreciate others' contributions, predicted psychological safety and moderated the effect of status. Psychological safety in turn predicted engagement in quality improvement work.

Psychological Safety and High Standards

Psychological safety describes the condition that makes candid disagreement possible. A team can hold high standards and still be psychologically safe, and in that combination learning tends to be strongest. The concept concerns whether people can speak openly about the work. It leaves expectations about the quality of the work intact, and a leader who builds psychological safety continues to give direct feedback and to hold people accountable for results.

Signs of Low Psychological Safety

Low psychological safety is rarely announced. It shows up in what a team stops doing:

• Meetings end with quick agreement, and objections surface later in private conversations.
• Problems reach the leader late, after they have become hard to fix.
• Few people ask questions, and the same two or three voices carry every discussion.
• Mistakes are explained away or attributed to others.
• Junior members and people from other disciplines contribute little, in line with the status effect described by Nembhard and Edmondson (2006).

How Leaders Build Psychological Safety

The studies above point to leader behavior as one of the main influences on how safe a team feels. Five practices follow from them:

1. Invite input explicitly. Ask for views by name, especially from people with less status in the room. Leader inclusiveness works through both the invitation and the appreciation that follows.
2. Respond constructively to bad news. The reaction to the first person who raises a problem tells everyone else what will happen if they do the same.
3. Acknowledge your own mistakes. A leader who names an error shows that doing so is acceptable.
4. Treat dissent with curiosity. Ask what the person sees that you may have missed before defending the plan.
5. Be consistent. Inconsistent reactions, even occasional ones, can quickly teach a team to stay quiet.

Psychological Safety Example

Consider a product team that has missed two release dates. In the weekly review the director asks whether the new date is realistic, and everyone says yes. Afterward, two engineers tell each other that the testing plan cannot be completed in time. The director learns of the problem three weeks later.

The director changes three things. She opens the next review by describing a planning error of her own. She asks each person, starting with the most junior, what could make the date slip. When an engineer raises the testing concern, she thanks him and asks what he would need to resolve it. Over the following weeks, risks begin to surface in the meeting itself, and the standard for the release stays where it was.

Psychological Safety and Political Skill

Building psychological safety depends on capabilities that research on political skill describes. Ferris and colleagues define political skill as the ability to understand others at work and use that knowledge to influence them toward personal and organizational objectives, and their Political Skill Inventory has four dimensions (Ferris et al., 2005). Two of them connect directly to this topic. Leaders with strong social astuteness are better at noticing when a team has gone quiet and why. Leaders with high apparent sincerity are more likely to be believed when they say that candor is welcome, which is what allows safety to take hold. A meta analysis found that political skill predicted task performance after controlling for the Big Five personality traits and general mental ability (Munyon, Summers, Thompson, and Ferris, 2015).

Status differences also shape who speaks. A leader who has mapped where power and informal influence sit in a team is better placed to see whose voice is missing. See the guides to stakeholder mapping and influence without authority, and the glossary entry on psychological safety for a short definition.

How Pine Perspective Relates to Psychological Safety

Pine Perspective measures what a leader can do. Its Influence Agility assessment covers three dimensions. Projected Authenticity describes whether others see a leader as credible and sincere, which bears on whether an invitation to speak up is believed. Relationship Navigation is the ability to build and maintain the working relationships in which candor becomes normal. Landscape Reading, the awareness of power structures, stakeholder interests and unwritten rules, helps a leader notice who holds back and why. A Decision Compass profile describes how a leader reasons through ethically weighted decisions. Psychological safety is a property of a team and sits outside what the Pine assessment scores. 360 feedback is one way for a leader to learn how safe their team actually feels. The method is described on the political skill assessment page.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the definition of psychological safety? Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, such as asking questions, admitting mistakes or raising concerns (Edmondson, 1999).

Who introduced the concept of team psychological safety? Amy Edmondson introduced the construct of team psychological safety in a 1999 article in Administrative Science Quarterly. Edmondson and Lei (2014) trace earlier work on psychological safety to organizational scholars in the 1960s.

Does psychological safety mean lower standards? A team can hold high standards and still be psychologically safe. Psychological safety concerns whether people can speak openly about problems, questions and disagreements, and it is compatible with direct feedback and accountability.

How can a leader increase psychological safety? By inviting input explicitly, responding constructively to bad news, acknowledging their own mistakes, treating dissent with curiosity and reacting consistently. Studies link managerial openness and leader inclusiveness to psychological safety (Detert and Burris, 2007; Nembhard and Edmondson, 2006).

References

• Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869 to 884.
• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350 to 383.
• Edmondson, A. C., & Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 23 to 43.
• Ferris, G. R., Treadway, D. C., Kolodinsky, R. W., Hochwarter, W. A., Kacmar, C. J., Douglas, C., & Frink, D. D. (2005). Development and validation of the political skill inventory. Journal of Management, 31(1), 126 to 152.
• Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113 to 165.
• Munyon, T. P., Summers, J. K., Thompson, K. M., & Ferris, G. R. (2015). Political skill and work outcomes: A theoretical extension, meta-analytic investigation, and agenda for the future. Personnel Psychology, 68(1), 143 to 184.
• Nembhard, I. M., & Edmondson, A. C. (2006). Making it safe: The effects of leader inclusiveness and professional status on psychological safety and improvement efforts in health care teams. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27(7), 941 to 966.