Psychological safety is a team's shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks: to ask a naive question, raise a concern or admit a mistake.¹
Where it comes from
Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis used the phrase in the 1960s, writing about organizational change.² Harvard's Amy Edmondson gave it its modern shape. Studying hospital units, she found that the better-led teams reported more medication errors, most likely because nurses there felt free to report them.³ Her 1999 study of 51 teams in a manufacturing company then showed that psychological safety went hand in hand with learning behavior, and learning behavior with team performance.¹
Where it goes wrong
The term is often heard as "everyone is nice here" or "nobody gets challenged." Edmondson describes something more demanding. Safety is what makes candor possible, and she pairs it with high standards: a team with safety and low standards settles into comfort, a team with both starts learning.⁴
Talent Takeaway
Watch how you respond to the next piece of bad news. Thank the messenger before you ask a single question about the problem. People decide in that moment whether the next report will reach you.
¹ Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
² Schein, E. H., & Bennis, W. G. (1965). Personal and organizational change through group methods: The laboratory approach. Wiley.
³ Edmondson, A. C. (1996). Learning from mistakes is easier said than done: Group and organizational influences on the detection and correction of human error. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 32(1), 5–28.
⁴ Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.
Further reading: Edmondson, A. C. (2023). Right kind of wrong: The science of failing well. Atria Books.