Just before the turn of the century, the term “psychological safety” was becoming well understood in academic circles thanks to Amy Edmondson’s 1999 paper, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. However, it would be another 15 years before the application of psychological safety was demonstrated in the workplace.
Psychological Safety, as Edmondson defined it in her paper, is a culture focused on valuing and respecting others, resulting in more successful teams. A key element of this culture is the ability for every person on the team, regardless of their role, to feel safe in speaking up, sharing ideas, asking questions, and raising concerns without the fear of embarrassment, humiliation, or reprisal.
Her findings ran contrary to traditional beliefs about management approaches and team composition. And until Julia Rozovsky led a project at Google, the findings had not been proven in an actual work setting.
In 2002, Google ran an experiment to see how successful the organization could be without managers. It failed. Then in 2008, they set out to prove that managers don’t matter, but they do. They then shifted focus and launched a research initiative called Project Oxygen to uncover what makes a great leader. The result is improvements across all management levels at Google.
Following up on these learnings, Google sought to understand what makes some teams successful while others fail. “Project Aristotle aimed to identify patterns and behaviours within teams that led to high performance. Starting in 2012, Google spent two years studying 180 of their teams – 115 in engineering and 65 in sales – examining 250 different team attributes.”
Using qualitative and quantitative metrics, Rozovsky and her team uncovered four common factors across successful teams: dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. But these four didn’t provide the whole picture. Of these teams, there were still differences in performance.
It wasn’t until Rozovsky read Edmondson’s paper that things began to click. In reviewing the research, the difference in performance could be attributed to teams that were able to express their opinions, thoughts, and ideas openly. They could take risks and be vulnerable. This led to more productive conversations as well as innovative solutions.
Over the past decade, Psychological Safety has become more common in organizations as they look to improve performance. However, as the idea has grown, so have misconceptions about what it means. A recent Harvard Business Review article addresses what people are getting wrong with psychological safety.
Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey, co-authors of the article, highlight six common misconceptions they observe regarding psychological safety.
- It doesn’t mean being nice to avoid arguments. Instead, being candid and offering constructive feedback are essential for improvement. “When psychological safety exists, people believe that sharing hard truths is expected. It allows good debates to happen when they’re needed. But it doesn’t mean that participants find debates comfortable,” they wrote.
- It doesn’t mean that all ideas necessarily have to be supported. While leaders should consider everyone’s input, they don’t need to agree when making a decision.
- It doesn’t mean protection from layoffs.
- It doesn’t have to get in the way of accountability for someone’s performance—leaders can still address mistakes.
- It cannot be implemented only through policy, such as the Workplace Psychological Safety Act passed by the Rhode Island state senate in 2024. “Telling people in a company or on a team that they must have psychological safety ‘or else’ will not produce it,” Edmondson and Kerrissey wrote. “Psychological safety, rather than being created by a policy, is built in a group, interaction by interaction.”
- It does not need to be started by top leadership in an organization—any team at any level can build a productive learning environment.
According to the authors, “Ironically, talking less about psychological safety and more about the goal and the context and why everyone’s input matters is the first step in building psychological safety.” They added, “Creating [psychological safety] may not be easy, and practicing it may not be comfortable,” they added. “But the pace of change and the level of uncertainty in the business environment make frank, data-driven conversations more valuable than ever.”
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