What Psychological Safety Actually Means — And What It Doesn't

Few concepts in organizational psychology have gained as much mainstream traction as psychological safety. Coined and rigorously studied by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety refers to a shared belief among team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (Edmondson, 1999). In practical terms, it means people feel confident they won't be punished, humiliated, or marginalized for speaking up with questions, concerns, mistakes, or unconventional ideas.

It's worth pausing on what psychological safety is not. It is not about being nice. It is not about lowering performance standards. It is not about avoiding conflict or creating a perpetually comfortable environment. Edmondson herself has been careful to distinguish psychological safety from a lack of accountability. In fact, her research shows that the highest-performing teams combine high psychological safety with high standards — a zone she calls the "learning zone." Teams with high safety but low standards drift into a "comfort zone." Teams with low safety and high standards create an "anxiety zone" where people are too afraid to admit mistakes or ask for help. And teams with neither? They're in apathy.

This distinction matters enormously for leaders. Creating psychological safety doesn't mean shielding people from tough feedback or avoiding difficult conversations. It means creating the conditions in which those conversations can actually happen — honestly, constructively, and without fear of retaliation.

The Evidence: From Hospital Floors to Google's Project Aristotle

Edmondson's initial research came from an unexpected finding. Studying medical teams in hospitals, she discovered that the best-performing units reported more errors, not fewer. This seemed counterintuitive — until she realized that higher-performing teams weren't making more mistakes. They were more willing to report and discuss them. The difference wasn't competence. It was culture. Teams with psychological safety surfaced errors early, learned from them, and prevented recurrence. Teams without it buried mistakes, and patients paid the price (Edmondson, 1996).

Since that seminal work, the evidence base has grown substantially. A meta-analysis by Frazier and colleagues (2017) examined 136 studies and found that psychological safety was significantly associated with information sharing, learning behavior, creativity, job satisfaction, work engagement, and task performance. The effect sizes weren't trivial — psychological safety predicted meaningful variance in team outcomes even after controlling for other factors like trust and group cohesion.

But the study that brought psychological safety into the mainstream conversation was Google's Project Aristotle, a multi-year internal research initiative launched in 2012. Google's People Analytics team set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what makes some teams at Google dramatically more effective than others? They studied 180 teams, examined over 250 team attributes, and tested dozens of hypotheses. Was it team composition? Seniority? Co-location? Personality mix?

The answer surprised even Google's own researchers. The single most important factor distinguishing high-performing teams from the rest was psychological safety. It wasn't about who was on the team. It was about how the team worked together. Teams with high psychological safety were more likely to harness the diverse perspectives of their members, take smart risks, admit when something wasn't working, and ultimately deliver better results (Duhigg, 2016). Dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact also mattered — but psychological safety was the foundation upon which everything else was built.

How Leaders Create — Or Destroy — Psychological Safety

If psychological safety is a team-level phenomenon, leadership is its primary architect. Research consistently shows that leader behavior is the single strongest predictor of whether a team develops psychological safety (Edmondson & Lei, 2014). This isn't about grand gestures or one-time declarations. It's about consistent, observable patterns of behavior — the micro-moments that signal to team members whether candor is welcomed or punished.

Behaviors That Build Psychological Safety

  • Framing work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. When leaders acknowledge uncertainty and complexity, they normalize the idea that no one has all the answers. This invites contribution rather than compliance.
  • Acknowledging their own fallibility. Leaders who say "I may be missing something — what are you seeing?" or "I made a mistake on this" give explicit permission for others to do the same. Humility is not weakness; it's a strategic signal.
  • Asking genuine questions. Not rhetorical questions. Not leading questions. Questions that demonstrate curiosity and a real desire to hear what others think. Research by Detert and Burris (2007) found that leader openness — actively inviting input — was a stronger predictor of employee voice than general trust in the organization.
  • Responding productively to bad news. This is where psychological safety lives or dies. When someone surfaces a problem and the leader's first response is gratitude and curiosity ("Thank you for raising this — tell me more"), safety grows. When the response is defensiveness, blame, or visible frustration, safety evaporates — not just for that person, but for everyone watching.
  • Creating structures for input. Psychological safety isn't only about interpersonal warmth. It's also about designing processes — pre-mortems, after-action reviews, anonymous feedback channels, round-robin input in meetings — that make it easier and more routine to speak up.

Behaviors That Destroy Psychological Safety

  • Punishing the messenger. Publicly criticizing someone who raises a concern, assigning blame before understanding context, or retaliating against dissenting voices — even subtly — sends a powerful message to the entire team.
  • Interrupting or dismissing contributions. When leaders consistently talk over others, respond with "we've already tried that," or visibly disengage when certain people speak, they create a hierarchy of voice that silences the team.
  • Demonstrating inconsistency. Saying "my door is always open" while reacting negatively to unwelcome feedback creates cognitive dissonance. Over time, team members learn to trust the behavior, not the words.
  • Modeling perfectionism. Leaders who never admit uncertainty, never acknowledge a mistake, and project infallibility create an implicit expectation that others must do the same. The result is a team that performs confidence rather than practices honesty.

The key insight from the research is that psychological safety is fragile. It takes consistent, deliberate effort to build and can be destroyed by a single incident — especially if that incident goes unaddressed. This is why leadership self-awareness is so critical. Most leaders who undermine psychological safety don't intend to. They simply don't see the impact of their own behavior patterns.

Measuring What Matters: A Self-Check for Your Team

One of the challenges with psychological safety is that the people most responsible for it — leaders — are often the last to know when it's absent. Team members rarely walk into a manager's office and say, "I don't feel psychologically safe." Instead, the symptoms show up indirectly: meetings where only the same two people talk, post-mortems that focus on blame, a pattern of surprises where problems surface late because no one flagged them early, or exit interviews filled with feedback that was never shared while the person was still on the team.

Edmondson's original research instrument included seven items that remain useful as a diagnostic lens. Consider how your team members would respond to the following statements, answering on a scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree":

  1. If I make a mistake on this team, it is not held against me.
  2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
  3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different. (reverse scored)
  4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.
  5. It is not difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
  6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
  7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

If reading those items prompts an uncomfortable realization — if the honest answer is that your team would not uniformly agree with most of them — that's actually a valuable data point. The gap between where a team is and where it needs to be is precisely the space where leadership development creates the most impact.

Of course, self-assessment has inherent limitations. Leaders tend to overestimate their own openness and underestimate their impact on others. This is why multi-rater feedback is so valuable. When the same question is answered not just by the leader, but by direct reports, peers, and supervisors, blind spots become visible. Patterns emerge that self-reflection alone cannot reveal.

From Insight to Action: Measuring Psychological Safety Through 360-Degree Feedback

The research is clear: psychological safety is not a "soft" skill — it is a measurable, developable leadership competency with direct implications for team performance, innovation, and retention. But knowing this conceptually and acting on it are very different things. The bridge between knowing and doing is measurement — specifically, measurement that captures how leaders are actually experienced by the people around them.

The Achieving Leader 360 (AL360) was designed with this evidence base in mind. Within its Communication & Relations domain, the AL360 includes a dedicated Psychological Safety factor that directly assesses the leadership behaviors Edmondson's research identifies as critical: inviting input, responding constructively to dissent, creating space for interpersonal risk-taking, and modeling the vulnerability that gives others permission to be honest. Because the AL360 is a multi-rater instrument, it captures not just the leader's self-perception but the lived experience of direct reports, peers, and supervisors — providing the kind of perspective gap analysis that turns vague intentions into targeted development.

The AL360's grounding in Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) adds another layer of practical depth. Psychological safety doesn't exist in a vacuum. It connects directly to people's fundamental needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When leaders create psychological safety, they simultaneously satisfy these basic psychological needs — which is why the effects cascade into engagement, motivation, and performance. The AL360 measures across six leadership domains and 19 factors, providing a comprehensive picture of how a leader's behavior patterns either reinforce or undermine the conditions for team effectiveness.

Beyond the AL360, understanding a leader's communication tendencies can further illuminate psychological safety dynamics. The DISC Behavioral Assessment helps leaders understand how their natural behavioral style — whether dominant, influential, steady, or conscientious — may be perceived by others, particularly in high-stakes conversations where psychological safety is most at risk. A leader with a high Dominance style, for example, may be unintentionally shutting down input simply through pace and directness, while a high Steadiness leader may avoid the productive conflict that psychological safety is meant to enable.

Practical Next Steps for Leaders and Teams

Building psychological safety is not a one-time initiative. It's a sustained leadership practice that requires ongoing awareness, feedback, and behavioral adjustment. Based on the research, here are actionable steps that leaders can begin implementing immediately:

  • Start your next team meeting differently. Open by asking a genuine question — not about status updates, but about concerns, obstacles, or things the team might be missing. Then wait. Silence is uncomfortable, but it's often the space in which psychological safety begins to grow.
  • Conduct a "safety audit." Use Edmondson's seven items (listed above) as an anonymous pulse survey for your team. Don't defend the results — discuss them. The conversation itself becomes an act of building safety.
  • Invest in multi-rater feedback. Self-awareness is the prerequisite for behavior change, and multi-rater assessments are the most reliable way to develop it. A 360-degree assessment reveals not what a leader intends, but what a leader creates.
  • Debrief failures publicly. When something goes wrong, model the behavior by sharing what happened, what was learned, and what will change — before asking others to do the same.
  • Track leading indicators. Don't wait for engagement surveys or exit interviews. Pay attention to who speaks in meetings, how quickly problems are surfaced, and whether people volunteer ideas without being asked. These are the real-time signals of psychological safety.
"There's no team without trust," Edmondson has noted, and there's no trust without the willingness to be vulnerable. Psychological safety is the mechanism through which trust becomes operational — translating good intentions into the daily interactions that define team culture.

The organizations that will thrive in an era of rapid change, complexity, and knowledge work are those that make it safe for people to contribute their full intelligence. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because leaders make it a priority — and because they have the data to know whether it's actually working.

Psychological safety is too important to leave to intuition. If developing stronger, more candid, higher-performing teams is a priority for your organization, start with measurement. The Achieving Leader 360 provides the evidence-based feedback leaders need to understand their impact on team safety — and to build the leadership behaviors that the research shows matter most. Visit the FactorFactory contact page to learn how to get started.