Spotlight on Psychological Safety
A deep-dive into psychological safety at work, its importance, and how we can promote it
Last year, 86% of Kiwi workers and 88% of businesses who participated in the 2023Work Well-being Index, released by the Skills Consulting Group, identified the importance of psychological safety at work. However, only 25% of businesses said they were confident about providing a psychologically safe environment.
Despite the low confidence in supporting psychological safety, research has consistently called out psychological safety as an essential driver of success in teams and businesses, with commentators noting “it cannot and should not be ignored”1, making the findings above that much more alarming.
Contents
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety has its origins in the mid-1960s, with researchers viewing it as a workplace phenomenon that mitigated anxiety in the face of uncertainty and change at work.
From the late 1990s, however - largely from the work of researcher Amy Edmondson - the concept underwent a renaissance.
From this work, psychological safety was conceptualised as a shared belief among workers that it is safe to take risks, such as speaking up or admitting mistakes, without fear of punishment or humiliation.
The Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum offer a comparison with another concept that is key to business and workers’ success: trust. While trust is about whether you, as an individual, will give someone the benefit of the doubt when you take a risk, psychological safety relates to whether others will give you the benefit of the doubt in the same scenario.
Why is psychological safety important?
Decades of research has revealed a key fact about psychological safety: it has wide-ranging benefits for individual workers, the teams they work in, and the wider business or organisation.
Psychological safety doesn’t just help people feel good at work, although it does that. It doesn’t just help foster a more diverse and inclusive work environment, although it does that as well… it substantially contributes to team effectiveness, learning, employee retention, and — most critically — better decisions and better performance.2
The reach, then, of psychological safety is huge, with teams and businesses consistently finding it is essential to their operations and performance.
Conversely, when psychological safety is perceived to be low or absent, businesses miss out on these benefits, and may experience an increase in errors or failures that could otherwise be easily prevented.
In such environments, individuals feel the effects more keenly, using more cognitive resources undertaking “protective behaviours, such as image management, self-evaluation, and monitoring to guard against potentially negative consequences”.3
What are the benefits of psychological safety?
Psychological safety has been identified as a key component of mentally healthy work; when it is high, it can support workers’ ability to thrive at work, but when low, as an organisational psychosocial risk, it can result in mental harm.
This is supported by research findings highlighting the importance of psychological safety in:
reducing emotional exhaustion
helping staff cope with stress and work-strain
mitigating burnout; and
encouraging workers to discuss offensive behaviours such as bullying, discrimination, and harassment.
Improvements in productivity and performance
Many years of research points to the importance of psychological safety in lifting the performance and productivity of individuals, teams, and businesses. One particular benefit seen in the literature is the role of psychological safety in supporting workers’ ability to re-frame errors as opportunities for improving performance.
Psychological safety has also been shown to mediate the relationship between a diverse workforce or climate and individuals’ performance. That is, minority workers’ performance is lifted when there is a high level of psychological safety.
It also supports organisations’ performance, with research showing the phenomenon “helps steady organizations against internal and external pressures that threaten performance”.4
Supporting teamwork
Various researchers have shown that psychological safety helps overcome barriers to effective teamwork such as role-based hierarchies, overly-diverse functions, or professional boundaries.
Such barriers can stifle open, frank discussion, preventing team members from:
sharing information or knowledge
learning together; and/or
engaging in robust problem-solving.
When psychological safety is high, these barriers are reduced, supporting team growth and performance. One particular benefit is that the behaviours listed above can improve relationships between colleagues and help reduce interpersonal conflict.
Finally, higher levels of psychological safety can improve teams’ safety performance, resulting in additional down stream benefits such as improved morale or higher levels of job satisfaction.
Supporting learning and development
There is a significant body of evidence supporting the role of psychological safety in facilitating learning and knowledge-transfer at the level of the individual, team/group, and business/organisation.
The relationship has been shown to be particularly strong when the knowledge shared reveals flaws or limitations, such as sharing mistakes with colleagues; conversely, where knowledge-sharing has little risk or strengthens a worker’s status, the level of psychological safety appears to have little effect.
The reverse – where people choose to hide or hold back knowledge – can be particularly damaging. Studies suggest low psychological safety characterised by ‘hiding behaviours’ affect workers’ ability to thrive at work, negatively affecting their experience, and the quality, of work.
Giving workers a voice
At its core, psychological safety allows workers to have a voice in their workplace. When it’s high, employees are comfortable asking questions, sharing knowledge and experience, challenging the status quo, and engaging in shared problem-solving.
Some research suggests psychological safety may be more strongly associated with silence. When psychological safety is low or absent, workers are reluctant to take the sort of risks linked to psychological safety (e.g., asking questions). In other words, when your employees are silent, this may indicate psychological safety is low in your team or organisation.
Boosting creativity and innovation
The risk-taking behaviours facilitated by psychological safety can result in greater creativity and innovation at work. When workers feel there won’t be a negative consequence with ‘risky’ behaviours, they have been shown to apply those experiences to other workplace behaviours, such as taking creative risks.
Similarly, by reducing or removing the cognitive burden associated with low psychological safety, employees have more resources available to devote to innovation in their work.
Improving inclusivity and workers’ sense of belonging
The open-ness associated with psychological safety has been shown to support diverse, inclusive work cultures, with research findings suggesting workers interpret high psychological safety as a greater sense of belonging.
Similarly, some studies indicate workers’ behaviours may be shaped by their perception of psychological safety, with higher levels resulting in more authentic, open behaviours. There is also evidence highlighting that psychological safety is “effective in mitigating the effect of boundaries created by individual differences”.5
Importantly, as workers’ sense of belonging reduces, their willingness to engage in risk-taking and learning behaviours also drops, further supporting the importance of psychological safety and reflecting a cycle of experience for workers.
What affects psychological safety?
The level of psychological safety in the workplace can be affected by a range of factors.
One example is the closeness of working relationships between workers. Edmondson and Bransby suggest that, regardless of the length of time, people who work closely together “develop similar perceptions of the degree to which candor, creativity, dissent, or requests for help are acceptable [sic].”6
In contrast, others suggest the length of time people work together is important. Some research demonstrates that teams who have worked together for less than 18 months have not had an opportunity to develop a shared perspective of psychological safety, negatively affecting the team’s overall performance and preventing them from openly engaging in so-called risky behaviours.
An important consideration is the fact that every member of a team or work group can influence the level of psychological safety. If one team member engages in behaviours that stifle risk-taking or encourages ‘hiding behaviours’, this can dramatically affect others’ willingness to engage in ‘speaking up’.
This is one reason why leaders have such an important role to play in supporting psychological safety.
The culture of a business or organisation can affect the level of psychological safety. In environments where decision-making is largely a top-down phenomenon or where, for example, it is unusual to engage in shared decision-making, a constructive level of psychological safety is typically difficult to establish and maintain.
Organisations with poor diversity and inclusion practices can introduce an additional barrier, as many of the discussions facilitated by psychological safety can be of a more personal, often sensitive nature; if workers feel the environment is not inclusive, they will most likely be reluctant to engage in those discussions.
Similarly, the way work is undertaken and designed can influence psychological safety. The post-COVID penchant for virtual meetings, for example, can affect workers’ perception of psychological safety by reducing or removing social and non-verbal cues, increasing feelings of isolation, and introducing more distractions into the working environment.
To boost psychological safety, leaders/managers and others in positions of authority need to attend to each of these factors.
Why are leaders important?
Without question, one of the key determinants of psychological safety in an organisation or business is leaders and their leadership style.
One way in which leaders influence psychological safety is through role-modelling risk-taking behaviours. Some research findings suggest that, when leaders share their own experiences and insights, team members feel a higher level of psychological safety.
By demonstrating and normalising these sorts of behaviours, and creating an environment that facilitates risk taking, leaders implicitly set expectations related to, and their actions demonstrate support for, psychological safety, potentially raising levels of the same within the workplace.
Psychological safety is a cornerstone of a positive organisational culture which is - as research suggests - driven by the way leaders ‘live’ or demonstrate their values, further underscoring the importance of role-modelling. Importantly, such modelling can result in a cycle that continuously lifts psychological safety.
Leaders also have a key role to play in the success of interventions aimed at raising psychological safety. In particular, when those in a leadership role demonstrate their support and buy-in for such interventions, the outcomes are more successful, resulting in a psychologically safe team.
Another important role for leaders is that of showing support for their employee's risk-taking behaviours.
Leaders should “show respect for those courageous enough to share their honest thoughts…recognising the vulnerability required to do so, and responding with appreciation [sic].”7
Generally speaking, a key function for leaders is to support their team members. Providing such “prosocial motivation”8 - taking action to protect and promote team members’ well-being - boosts a team’s psychological safety.
Research suggests that psychological safety can play a mediating role between types of leadership and team members’ creativity, learning, and performance. In other words, when psychological safety is higher, teams are more creative, more open to learning, and demonstrate a higher level of performance.
Similarly, psychological safety can support outcomes associated with more positive leadership styles, such as benevolent, authentic, or servant leadership. Recent research examined the effect of different leadership styles on psychological safety; while this work focused on the IT industry, some broad insights can be taken from its findings.
With a focus on teamwork and open communication, transformational leadership is associated with high levels of psychological safety.
The more defined, rigid approach associated with transactional leadership can result in an environment of moderate psychological safety, as team members are afraid of making mistakes or being punished for taking risks.
Leaders who apply a servant leadership style are seen to be more empathetic and caring towards team members, and are viewed as valuing and supporting employees. This typically results in much higher levels of psychological safety.
Characterised by flexibility and continuous improvement, with an emphasis on collaboration and feedback, agile leadership can result in moderate to high levels of psychological safety, as team members feel safe articulating their ideas and views.
A democratic leadership style, defined by shared decision-making, diversity of perspectives, and wider participation and engagement, results in high levels of psychological safety, because team members feel their views are actively sought and respected.
The more casual laissez-faire approach, in which independence is valued, but there is little guidance from leaders, typically leads to lower levels of psychological safety.
Some research has also examined the relationship between levels of psychological safety and power distance. Higher levels of power distance – the degree to which workers perceive power to be unevenly or inequitably distributed – are associated with lower levels of psychological safety.
This has been shown to affect employees’ intentions to report incidents that affect them at work: when power is perceived to be unevenly shared, not only is psychological safety seen to be lower, but staff are less likely to report such incidents.
How can we build psychological safety?
Psychological safety is a dynamic or fluid phenomenon; businesses and teams with low levels can build it up over time while, conversely, if it’s not maintained, a high level of psychological safety can decrease over time.
To build psychological safety, leaders at all levels of a business first need to set the stage. Messages supporting experimentation, honesty and candour, asking questions, and sharing experiences should abound; leverage all available media to spread these messages. According to Amy Edmondson, leaders need to give their staff “permission to feel”.9 Part of this process involves raising awareness about why risk-taking behaviours are important to business, team, and individual success.
Staff need to then be invited to take action by being asked to engage in risk-taking. Use every conversations as opportunities for workers to:
share their ideas and perspectives
ask questions
share ‘lessons learned’
challenge the status quo; and/or
share their mistakes.
When doing so, it’s important leaders leverage multiple feedback channels including those that support anonymous feedback.
To support this, it’s important leaders understand their workers well enough to ensure they facilitate team members’ ability to speak up and use tools and methods that align with staff members’ needs and preferences.
At the same time, leaders and team members need to work on providing a safe environment where risk-taking can occur in a positive and constructive framework. Concepts such as compassion and open-mindedness are central to such an environment, supported by intentional exploration of how conflicting perspectives can be managed and how staff can respectfully disagree with each other.
As noted earlier, modelling risk-taking is an essential function of leaders in supporting psychological safety. However, colleagues and teams can also use this approach and, in doing so, normalising behaviours that support psychological safety. This can be buoyed by training and resources to ensure everyone understands the importance of psychological safety and, in team environments, can collectively work on cultural norms to support its development in multiple contexts.
In terms of training, some research has supported the use of videos – including those where leaders set expectations and provide support for risk-taking and in which scenarios or dramatisations of psychologically (un)safe behaviours – to build psychological safety. Similarly, educational workshops aimed at teaching staff about psychological safety and providing a space to establish guidelines for promoting psychological safety have also proven useful.
[The] literature suggests that education alone is insufficient for changing behaviour and that it is necessary to have a context which is receptive to change and appropriate facilitation.10
One key element of building and maintaining psychological safety is considering how we respond when others speak up. Any positive effort expended in supporting psychological safety can be eroded or, worse, destroyed by responses such as:
ignoring feedback, input, or different perspectives when they are shared
taking it personally, ‘freaking out’, and/or arguing with the speaker when they provide feedback
responding negatively when someone tries something new but it fails (especially when it is an approach you have requested)
ignoring or not answering questions when they are asked
Tip: if you say you will “get back” to someone with a response, make sure you do so and in a timely manner]; and/or
shutting people down when they are challenging the status quo or asking what you perceive to be ‘difficult’ questions.
It’s important to remember that, when staff are speaking up, they are taking a risk and being vulnerable. This makes the response to their risk-taking especially important. Being responsive, accepting, and/or appreciative to staff members’ contributions will support psychological safety.
Most importantly, everyone – but especially leaders - needs to replace a blame mindset with curiosity.
It is important for leaders to model curiosity and ask questions, so individuals start to get a sense that the leader is interested in what they are doing and want their authentic perspectives.11
Alongside a curiosity-driven approach, it is important leaders regularly ‘check in’ with their staff, assessing how the journey to building psychological safety is progressing and giving feedback on how they believe this work is supporting the business, team, and individuals.
Some work has explored the role of active listening in supporting psychological safety. Active listening is an approach whereby the listener uses verbal and nonverbal strategies to engage with, and communicate interest in, the speaker, while also seeking to understand and attend to a speaker’s message. This approach helps build a sense of safety in the speaker-listener relationship, and, importantly has been shown to be effective in interventions that foster psychological safety. Staff at all level of an organisation or business should focus on improving active listening skills to support the development of psychological safety.
When building psychological safety, it is important to consider patterns within a team. Identifying whether there are team members who experience higher or lower levels of psychological safety is essential in ensuring interventions are targeted.
Different patterns (e.g., teams include members with high and low ratings or teams have members who rate psychological safety similarly) can be caused by a range of factors. Some research suggests the length of time team members have worked together can affect ratings, while other findings point to the strength of the leader-employee relationship as a key factor. From an intervention perspective, what’s important is the need “to isolate what beliefs, actions, or circumstances [have given] rise to those different patterns.”12
Approaches that support team development can serve as a ‘back door’ for building psychological safety. These include mechanisms such as:
building interpersonal relationships within teams
focusing on problem-solving; and
clarifying team roles and responsibilities.
An essential intervention to support psychological safety is engagement and communication.
Organisations do not flourish with a burden of secrets and confidences, while hidden agendas engender distrust and damage relationships; this type of approach is antithetical to a high level of psychological safety.13
To support a culture with a high level of psychological safety, business leaders need to facilitate a transparent, honest approach to engagement where staff can provide feedback and demonstrable input into decision-making.
Psychological safety, then, should be a non-negotiable for any business. There is perhaps no better way to close than these sentiments from Amy Edmondson:
The coherence and amount of the cumulative research suggests that creating a climate of psychological safety should be near the top of the leadership agenda for organizations around the world. Whether you lead a small team or a global enterprise, ensuring that people can speak up, ask for help, offer ideas, provide dissenting views, or collaborate effectively across boundaries may be essential.14
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Koutny, N. & Chatziadam, P. (2023, p.11).
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Hau, E. J. (2023, p.15).
Edmondson, A. C., & Bransby, D. P. (2023, p.63).
Ibid, p.67.
Ibid, p.69.
Center for Creative Leadership (2023, p.3).
Edmondson, A. C., & Bransby, D. P. (2023, p.62).
Edmondson, A. C. (2021, p.5).
O’Donovan, R. & McAuliffe, E. (2020, p.6).
Dealy Cottrell, S. R. (2023, p.48).
Loignon, A., & Wormington, S. (2022, p.16).
Mental Health Foundation (2016, p.16).
Edmondson, A. C., & Bransby, D. P. (2023, p.74).