Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. [1] [2] In teams, it refers to team members believing that they can take risks without being shamed by other team members. [3] In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected. It is also the most studied enabling condition in group dynamics and team learning research.
Psychological safety benefits organizations and teams in many different ways. There are multiple empirically supported consequences of a team being psychologically safe. [4]
Most of the research on the effects of psychological safety has focused on benefits, but there are some drawbacks that have been studied. [5]
Psychological safety has been an important discussion area in the field of psychology, behavioral management, leadership, teams, and healthcare. Results from a number of empirical studies conducted in various regions and countries show that psychological safety plays an important role in workplace effectiveness (Edmondson and Lei, 2014). [6] It has consistently played an important role by facilitating ideas and activities to a shared enterprise. It also enables teams and organizations to learn and perform and in recent years, it has become a more significant organizational phenomenon due to the increased necessity of learning and innovation.
The term 'psychological safety' was coined by the psychologist and psychotherapist Carl Rogers in the 1950s in the context of establishing the conditions necessary to foster an individual's creativity. According to Rogers, psychological safety is associated with three processes: accepting the individual as of unconditional worth; providing a climate in which external evaluation is absent; and understanding empathically. [7] [8] Hubert Bonner, a professor of psychology at Ohio Wesleyan University used the term in the context of human needs for security. In addition to physiological and safety needs, he wrote, an individual needs to believe in something to feel secure, even clinging to those beliefs in the face of contrary evidence, because they provide "psychological safety". [9]
In the context of "laboratory training" and T-groups to effect organizational change, Schein and Bennis, in 1965, defined it as "an atmosphere where one can take chances (which experimentalism implies) without fear and with sufficient protection (...) thus a climate is built which encourages provisional tries and which tolerates failure without retaliation, renunciation, or guilt". [10]
Point 8 of W. E. Deming's 14 Points For Management, written in 1982, of "Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company" [11] highlights a similar growing realisation, in contrast to previous Taylorist management approaches, that the creation of environments where it is interpersonally safe to raise concerns is of crucial importance to realising high quality business outcomes.
Explicit interest in psychological safety was renewed by Kahn in the 1990s, [12] through qualitative studies which showed that psychological safety enables people to "employ or express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally". This was in parallel with emerging progressive management paradigms at the time such as safety culture and the Toyota Production System (TPS) that introduced a physical representation of psychological safety, the Andon Cord, which explicitly provides employees with the empowerment to raise issues or concerns. [13]
Psychological safety is a group-level phenomenon. [6] Research on team effectiveness emphasises input-process-output (IPO) models, and some studies see psychological safety as an input that promotes team performance through team learning as a mediator (process).
A significant antecedent of psychological safety is trust (input) which plays an important role in knowledge sharing as well as a mediating (process) role partially (Zhang et al., 2010). [14] A number of studies show that psychological safety is a mediator of relationships between antecedent (similar to 'input variables' in the input-process-output model) including organizational context, team characteristics and team leadership, and outcomes (similar to 'output variables' in IPO model) of innovation, performance, learning, and improvement in or by a team. Although psychological safety has a significant effect as a mediator in explaining team outcomes, it also plays a role as a moderator. Here, psychological safety as a mediator acts as an input in case of teamwork as well as process or emergent state. Due to the boundary condition, it may not help teams to learn when particular conditions such as absence of interdependence are supporting teamwork.
When team members are motivated at work and want to share an idea for improving performance, they frequently do not speak up because they fear that they will be harshly judged. [15] When psychological safety is present, team members think less about the potential negative consequences of expressing a new or different idea than they would otherwise. [3] As a result, they speak up more when they feel psychologically safe and are motivated to improve their team or company. [10] [16] [17]
Given its current status (in 2022) as an emergent type of safety (e.g. as compared with the older idea of physical safety), it is easy to confuse psychological safety with more well-established concepts such as trust and psychological mindfulness. A primary difference between psychological safety and trust is that psychological safety focuses on a belief about a group norm – emerging from the group's common experiences/perceptions regarding the expected consequences from taking interpersonal risks, in context of its social norms defining the 'correct' in-group behaviours and interactions (e.g. as part of organisational safety culture/climate). Compared with the phenomena of trust, psychological safety has been observed to occur more often in context of larger groups than the typically dyad focused nature of trusting relationships [18] (e.g. as a relationship clinicians have in mind with their host organisations [19] ); additionally a sort of 'temporally immediate' (i.e. right now) feeling seems to characterise the experience of psychological safety, rather than the typically deferred (i.e. much later) feeling co-present in experiencing trust. [18] These differences between the concepts of psychological safety and trust are becoming established in institutional/organisational study contexts, where trust focuses on a belief and view that one person has about another, whereas psychological safety can be defined by how members of larger social groups think they are viewed by others in the group. [20]
Mindfulness is also different from psychological safety in that mindfulness is about being aware of one's surroundings but psychological safety is focused on being respected in a group. Moreover, the most studied result of psychological safety, team learning, is defined as a group adjusting to its surrounding through outwardly sharing observations about their environment. However, mindfulness is an individual becoming internally enlightened about his/her environment.
There has been a wide amount of empirical research on the benefits of psychologically safety since the concept was created. The following are the most empirically supported benefits of a team being psychologically safe. [21]
Multiple studies have shown businesses’ efforts in process innovation have had moderate to no success and have not improved firm performance. [22] Psychological safety is shown to be an effective and important moderator of the relationship between process innovation and firm performance. [22] This is due to cooperation being an important factor in process innovation. To have cooperation, it’s important to have an environment where people feel safe to share ideas.
Psychological safety is shown to have both direct and indirect effects on “manufacturing process innovation (MPI) performance.” [23] It directly increases MPI performance as there is a greater likelihood of successful implementation of these process innovations when team members feel safe to speak up about problems and use everyone’s knowledge to help solve the problem. It also serves as a mediator as having established processes of sharing information increases psychological safety in teams which leads to MPI performance improvement
In hospital units, members believing they will not be punished for reporting mistakes were correlated with higher rates of errors being detected. [24] This illustrates a cycle in which members in units with psychological safety discuss errors more, which leads to other members being more willing to report errors in the future as there is less risk associated with reporting mistakes.
A study surveying employees at a manufacturing company in China found that psychological safety did not directly affect employee engagement at work, but did affect it indirectly with employees voicing their thoughts as a mediator. [25] When the perceived risks of speaking up are low, meaning psychological safety is high, employees feel more comfortable sharing their opinions which leads to more engagement in their work.
A study examining research & development teams from multiple industries in China found that psychological safety is a mediator of the relationship between team leaders’ cooperative conflict management style and team innovation performance. [26] When team leaders have a cooperative conflict management style, psychological safety in teams is increased because conflict is solved through open communication and cooperation between the team leader and team members. Through this effect of increasing psychological safety, team innovation performance is further improved.
A study examining 180 employees in research & development teams in 8 organizations found that psychological safety is a mediator of the relationship between leadership and employee creativity. [27] Inclusive leadership increases psychological safety because when leaders show they are open and available to listen, employees feel that it is safe to share new ideas. In turn, psychological safety increases employee involvement in creative work. This is because employees feel safe to engage in creative work such as questioning ideas and procedures and sharing their new ideas or suggestions for changes.
Much of the research on psychological safety has focused on the benefits it has for teams. [5] However, research in management literature suggests that antecedents normally positively associated with desired outcomes eventually reach a point where the relationship turns negative. [28] This is known as the "too-much-of-a-good-thing" (TMGT) effect. For example, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between conscientiousness and performance, meaning conscientiousness initially has a positive effect on performance, but too much leads to a decrease in performance. [28]
One study examining these potential negative outcomes looked at the effects of utilitarianism on unethical behavior in teams with psychological safety has a mediator. [5] The results showed that teams whose members are more utilitarian were more likely to engage in unethical behavior like cheating. This effect was even more pronounced in teams with higher levels of psychological safety.
More recent research highlights the negative effects of psychological safety on work motivation in group members and a further resulting negative effect on taking risks. [29] Higher psychological safety was associated with lower motivation. Through the motivation mechanism, it led to group members being less likely to speak up about new ideas or voice any concerns and also less likely to learn and improve on their processes.
Leaders as well as some aspects of the team can increase team members' psychological safety. Two aspects of leadership have been shown to be particularly instrumental in creating a psychologically safe team. They are leaders using:
There are also two aspects of a team that help improve its psychological safety. They are:
Industrial and organizational psychology "focuses the lens of psychological science on a key aspect of human life, namely, their work lives. In general, the goals of I-O psychology are to better understand and optimize the effectiveness, health, and well-being of both individuals and organizations." It is an applied discipline within psychology and is an international profession. I-O psychology is also known as occupational psychology in the United Kingdom, organisational psychology in Australia and New Zealand, and work and organizational (WO) psychology throughout Europe and Brazil. Industrial, work, and organizational (IWO) psychology is the broader, more global term for the science and profession.
Virtual management, is the supervision, leadership, and maintenance of virtual teams—dispersed work groups that rarely meet face to face. As the number of virtual teams has grown, facilitated by the Internet, globalization, outsourcing, and remote work, the need to manage them has also grown. The following article provides information concerning some of the important management factors involved with virtual teams, and the life cycle of managing a virtual team.
Organization development (OD) is the study and implementation of practices, systems, and techniques that affect organizational change. The goal of which is to modify a group's/organization's performance and/or culture. The organizational changes are typically initiated by the group's stakeholders. OD emerged from human relations studies in the 1930s, during which psychologists realized that organizational structures and processes influence worker behavior and motivation.
Team building is a collective term for various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within teams, often involving collaborative tasks. It is distinct from team training, which is designed by a combine of business managers, learning and development/OD and an HR Business Partner to improve the efficiency, rather than interpersonal relations.
Organizational learning is the process of creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge within an organization. An organization improves over time as it gains experience. From this experience, it is able to create knowledge. This knowledge is broad, covering any topic that could better an organization. Examples may include ways to increase production efficiency or to develop beneficial investor relations. Knowledge is created at four different units: individual, group, organizational, and inter organizational.
Historically there have been differences among investigators regarding the definition of organizational culture. Edgar Schein, a leading researcher in this field, defined "organizational culture" as comprising a number of features, including a shared "pattern of basic assumptions" which group members have acquired over time as they learn to successfully cope with internal and external organizationally relevant problems. Elliott Jaques first introduced the concept of culture in the organizational context in his 1951 book The Changing Culture of a Factory. The book was a published report of "a case study of developments in the social life of one industrial community between April, 1948 and November 1950". The "case" involved a publicly-held British company engaged principally in the manufacture, sale, and servicing of metal bearings. The study concerned itself with the description, analysis, and development of corporate group behaviours.
A virtual team usually refers to a group of individuals who work together from different geographic locations and rely on communication technology such as email, instant messaging, and video or voice conferencing services in order to collaborate. The term can also refer to groups or teams that work together asynchronously or across organizational levels. Powell, Piccoli and Ives (2004) define virtual teams as "groups of geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or more organizational tasks." As documented by Gibson (2020), virtual teams grew in importance and number during 2000-2020, particularly in light of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic which forced many workers to collaborate remotely with each other as they worked from home.
Organizational climate is a concept that has academic meaning in the fields of organizational behavior and I/O psychology as well as practical meaning in the business world There is continued scholarly debate about the exact definition of organizational climate for the purposes of scientific study. The definition developed by Lawrence R. James (1943-2014) and his colleagues makes a distinction between psychological and organizational climate.
"Psychological climate is defined as the individual employee’s perception of the psychological impact of the work environment on his or her own well-being. When employees in a particular work unit agree on their perceptions of the impact of their work environment, their shared perceptions can be aggregated to describe their organizational climate ."
The leader–member exchange (LMX) theory is a relationship-based approach to leadership that focuses on the two-way (dyadic) relationship between leaders and followers.
Greenberg (1987) introduced the concept of organizational justice with regard to how an employee judges the behavior of the organization and the employee's resulting attitude and behaviour. For example, if a firm makes redundant half of the workers, an employee may feel a sense of injustice with a resulting change in attitude and a drop in productivity.
Knowledge sharing is an activity through which knowledge is exchanged among people, friends, peers, families, communities, or within or between organizations. It bridges the individual and organizational knowledge, improving the absorptive and innovation capacity and thus leading to sustained competitive advantage of companies as well as individuals. Knowledge sharing is part of the knowledge management process.
Participative decision-making (PDM) is the extent to which employers allow or encourage employees to share or participate in organizational decision-making. According to Cotton et al., the format of PDM could be formal or informal. In addition, the degree of participation could range from zero to 100% in different participative management (PM) stages.
Positive psychology is defined as a method of building on what is good and what is already working instead of attempting to stimulate improvement by focusing on the weak links in an individual, a group, or in this case, a company. Implementing positive psychology in the workplace means creating an environment that is more enjoyable, productive, and values individual employees. This also means creating a work schedule that does not lead to emotional and physical distress.
Adaptive performance in the work environment refers to adjusting to and understanding change in the workplace. An employee who is versatile is valued and important in the success of an organization. Employers seek employees with high adaptability, due to the positive outcomes that follow, such as excellent work performance, work attitude, and ability to handle stress. Employees, who display high adaptive performance in an organization, tend to have more advantages in career opportunities unlike employees who are not adaptable to change. In previous literature, Pulakos and colleagues established eight dimensions of adaptive performance.
Team effectiveness is the capacity a team has to accomplish the goals or objectives administered by an authorized personnel or the organization. A team is a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, share responsibility for outcomes, and view themselves as a unit embedded in an institutional or organizational system which operates within the established boundaries of that system. Teams and groups have established a synonymous relationship within the confines of processes and research relating to their effectiveness while still maintaining their independence as two separate units, as groups and their members are independent of each other's role, skill, knowledge or purpose versus teams and their members, who are interdependent upon each other's role, skill, knowledge and purpose.
Functional diversity encapsulates the cognitive resource diversity theory, which is the idea that diversity of cognitive resources promotes creativity and innovation, problem solving capacity, and organizational flexibility. Functionally diverse teams “consist of individuals with a variety of educational and training backgrounds working together." This differs from social diversity, which in accordance with the similarity attraction (homophily) paradigm, is the idea that individuals who are more similar together are able to work together more effectively. There is a degree of ambiguity in academic literature in the definition of functional and social diversity due to many studies in this matter either focusing on one or the other or mashing up the different characteristics. Psychologists, economists, sociologists have conducted numerous studies on diversity within groups to examine the effects on group performance. There are debates about benefits and costs of working in a functionally diverse groups. Milliken and Martins (1996) concluded that “diversity appears to be a double-edged sword”.
Team diversity refers to the differences between individual members of a team that can exist on various dimensions like age, nationality, religious background, functional background or task skills, sexual orientation, and political preferences, among others. Different types of diversity include demographic, personality and functional diversity, and can have positive as well as negative effects on team outcomes. Diversity can impact performance, team member satisfaction or the innovative capacity of a team. According to the Input-Process-Output Model, team diversity is considered an input factor that has effects on the processes as well as on the team outputs of team work.
Amy C. Edmondson is an American scholar of leadership, teaming, and organizational learning. She is currently Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. Edmondson is the author of seven books and more than 75 articles and case studies. She is best known for her pioneering work on psychological safety, which has helped spawn a large body of academic research in management, healthcare and education over the past 15 years. Her books include "Right Kind of Wrong, the Science of Failing Well", “The Fearless Organization,Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth” (2018)) and “Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy” (2012).
Psychosocial safety climate (PSC) is a term used in organisational psychology that refers to the shared belief held by workers that their psychological health and safety is protected and supported by senior management. PSC builds on other work stress theories and concerns the corporate climate for worker psychological health and safety. Studies have found that a favourable PSC is associated with low rates of absenteeism and high productivity, while a poor climate is linked to high levels of workplace stress and job dissatisfaction. PSC can be promoted by organisational practices, policies and procedures that prioritise the psychosocial safety and wellbeing of workers. The theory has implications for the design of workplaces for the best possible outcomes for both workers and management.
Jin Nam Choi is a Korean organizational psychologist, researcher, author, and academic. He is a professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the Graduate School of Business of Seoul National University.
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