By Kent E. Frese, Ph.D. — Industrial-Organizational Psychologist and Founder, FactorFactory
In the search for what makes teams effective, organizations have invested heavily in hiring the right people, building complementary skill sets, and establishing clear goals. These factors matter. But over the past two decades, a growing body of research has converged on a less obvious variable — one that predicts team performance more reliably than talent composition, resource allocation, or even strategic clarity. That variable is psychological safety: the shared belief among team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.
The concept has moved from academic journals to boardroom conversations, in large part because of Amy Edmondson's foundational research at Harvard and Google's widely publicized Project Aristotle. Yet despite its visibility, psychological safety remains one of the most misunderstood constructs in organizational life. It is not about being nice. It is not about avoiding conflict. And it is not something that can be created by a single workshop or policy memo. Understanding what the research actually says — and what it means for leadership behavior — is essential for any organization serious about building high-performing teams.
What the Research Actually Shows
Amy Edmondson first defined team psychological safety in her landmark 1999 paper as "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking" (Edmondson, 1999). This means team members feel confident that they will not be punished, humiliated, or marginalized for speaking up with questions, concerns, mistakes, or half-formed ideas. Edmondson's original research, conducted across teams in a manufacturing company, found that higher-performing teams did not make fewer errors — they reported more errors. The difference was that psychologically safe teams surfaced problems early, learned from them, and adapted. Teams without psychological safety buried mistakes, avoided difficult conversations, and stagnated.
What made this finding so striking was its counterintuitive nature. Leaders who assumed that fewer reported errors meant better performance were systematically rewarding the wrong teams. The quiet, seemingly smooth-running teams were often the ones most at risk, because silence was masking problems rather than reflecting their absence.
Edmondson's work has since been replicated and extended across industries, cultures, and organizational levels. A meta-analysis by Frazier, Fainshmidt, Klinger, Pezeshkan, and Vracheva (2017) examined 136 studies and found that psychological safety was significantly associated with information sharing, learning behavior, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and task performance. The effect sizes were not trivial — psychological safety emerged as one of the strongest team-level predictors of both learning behavior and work performance.
Perhaps most compelling to business audiences was Google's Project Aristotle, an internal research initiative that studied 180 teams across the company to determine what distinguished high-performing teams from average ones (Duhigg, 2016). After analyzing over 250 team attributes, Google's researchers concluded that who was on a team mattered far less than how the team worked together. The single most important factor? Psychological safety. It was the foundation upon which the other four dynamics — dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact — were built.
Why Psychological Safety Is Not What Most People Think
One of the most common misunderstandings is equating psychological safety with comfort or the absence of conflict. Edmondson herself has been explicit on this point: psychological safety is not about lowering performance standards or creating an environment where people are shielded from feedback. In fact, it is the opposite. Psychologically safe teams are characterized by more candor, not less — more willingness to challenge each other's ideas, to admit uncertainty, and to raise issues before they become crises.
This distinction matters enormously in practice. When leaders interpret psychological safety as "being nice" or "making everyone feel good," they tend to avoid accountability conversations, tolerate underperformance, and create cultures of false harmony. Edmondson (2019) describes a two-by-two framework in her book The Fearless Organization, plotting psychological safety against performance standards. When both are high, teams enter a "learning zone" characterized by high performance and continuous improvement. When psychological safety is high but standards are low, teams drift into a "comfort zone." And when standards are high but psychological safety is low, teams operate in an "anxiety zone" — a state that produces short-term results at the cost of burnout, turnover, and suppressed innovation.
The anxiety zone is where many small and mid-sized businesses unwittingly find themselves. The owner or senior leader sets demanding expectations — as they should — but the interpersonal climate does not support the kind of risk-taking that learning and innovation require. People learn to keep their heads down, agree with the boss, and avoid being the one who raises a problem without a ready-made solution. Over time, this dynamic hollows out organizational intelligence. The leader makes more and more decisions in an informational vacuum, wondering why the team does not "step up."
The Leadership Behavior Connection
Research consistently shows that leader behavior is the single most important antecedent of team psychological safety. In their study of leadership and team learning, Hirak, Peng, Carmeli, and Schaubroeck (2012) found that leader inclusiveness — defined as words and deeds by a leader that invite and appreciate others' contributions — was directly related to team psychological safety, which in turn predicted team learning from failures. This finding aligns with decades of I-O psychology research on transformational leadership and leader-member exchange theory, which emphasize the role of the leader in shaping interpersonal norms.
What does this look like in behavioral terms? Leaders who foster psychological safety tend to exhibit specific, observable patterns: they ask genuine questions rather than testing for "right answers," they acknowledge their own mistakes and limitations, they respond to bad news with curiosity rather than blame, and they actively solicit dissenting views before making decisions. These are not personality traits — they are learnable behaviors. But they require self-awareness, and they require feedback.
This is where multi-rater feedback becomes invaluable. A leader's self-perception of their approachability and openness is frequently disconnected from how their team actually experiences them. Research on self-other agreement in 360-degree feedback (Atwater & Yammarino, 1997) has consistently shown that leaders tend to overestimate their effectiveness in precisely the interpersonal domains that matter most for psychological safety — listening, inviting input, and responding constructively to disagreement. Without data from direct reports, peers, and supervisors, leaders operate on assumptions about their impact rather than evidence.
The Achieving Leader 360 (AL360) assessment addresses this gap directly. By gathering behavioral ratings from multiple perspectives — including how leaders handle feedback, invite participation, and respond to mistakes — the AL360 provides the kind of specific, actionable data that allows leaders to see the gap between their intentions and their impact. For leaders who genuinely want to build psychological safety, this data is not threatening; it is the starting point.
From Practice
A professional services firm with approximately 85 employees — a mix of engineers, project managers, and technical staff — brought in FactorFactory after struggling with a pattern that puzzled the managing partners. Individually, their senior leaders were strong. Each had a track record of delivering results and managing client relationships. But collectively, the leadership team was dysfunctional. Cross-functional projects stalled. Decisions made in leadership meetings were quietly undermined or simply ignored. Two of the strongest leaders had stopped attending optional strategy sessions altogether.
Initial conversations with the managing partners revealed the standard hypothesis: personality clashes. "They just don't get along." But assessment data told a different story. DISC behavioral assessments showed that the leadership team actually had a productive mix of behavioral styles — high-D drivers alongside steady-S implementers and conscientious-C analytical thinkers. The profiles were complementary, not conflicting. The problem was not who these leaders were. The problem was how they interacted.
When AL360 data came back, the pattern became clear. Three of the firm's most influential leaders scored significantly lower on items related to inviting input, responding to disagreement, and creating space for dissenting perspectives. Their direct reports described environments where raising a concern was treated as a lack of commitment, where admitting uncertainty was viewed as weakness, and where the fastest way to get through a meeting was to agree and move on. One anonymous rater comment captured it precisely: "I've learned that the safest thing to say in a leadership meeting is nothing."
The managing partners were surprised — not because they disbelieved the data, but because they had never had access to it. What followed was a structured development process that included individual coaching around specific behavioral feedback, team-level conversations about communication norms, and a follow-up assessment cycle nine months later. The firm did not transform overnight. But within a year, two measurable shifts had occurred: the leadership team's meeting participation — tracked by the number of agenda items raised by non-senior partners — had increased meaningfully, and a client satisfaction survey that had been flat for three years showed its first significant improvement. The connection between internal communication and external results was not coincidental.
Building Psychological Safety With Data, Not Slogans
The challenge with psychological safety is that it is easy to endorse in principle and difficult to build in practice. Every leader will agree that people should feel comfortable speaking up. Far fewer leaders consistently behave in ways that make speaking up feel safe. This gap between espoused values and enacted behavior is one of the oldest findings in organizational psychology (Argyris, 1991), and it is precisely why measurement matters.
Organizations serious about psychological safety need to move beyond aspiration and into assessment. This means gathering behavioral data from multiple perspectives, not just self-reports. It means tracking specific leadership behaviors — not vague competencies like "creates an open environment" — but observable actions like soliciting input before stating a position, responding to errors with questions rather than blame, and publicly acknowledging when a direct report's pushback improved a decision. These are the behaviors that Edmondson's research, and the broader literature, have identified as the building blocks of psychologically safe teams.
It also means understanding that psychological safety is not a fixed state. It fluctuates with leadership transitions, organizational stress, and even meeting-to-meeting dynamics. Teams that were psychologically safe under one leader may lose that foundation entirely when leadership changes. This is why periodic assessment — not a one-time measurement — is essential. The organizations that sustain high-performing teams treat psychological safety as an ongoing practice supported by data, not a box to check during an annual engagement survey.
For small and mid-sized businesses, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that these organizations often lack the infrastructure — dedicated OD teams, annual climate surveys, formal coaching programs — that larger organizations use to monitor and develop team dynamics. The opportunity is that in a 50- or 150-person company, the senior leader's behavior has an outsized impact. A single leader shifting how they run meetings, respond to mistakes, and solicit feedback can change the psychological safety of an entire organization in ways that would take years in a company of 10,000.
The starting point is always the same: data. Not assumptions about how leaders are perceived, but actual multi-rater feedback from the people who experience their leadership daily. If the goal is to build teams that learn faster, adapt more readily, and perform at a higher level, the research is clear — psychological safety is the foundation. And foundations are built with evidence, not intentions.
Ready to measure what matters for team performance? The Achieving Leader 360 (AL360) provides the specific, behavioral feedback leaders need to understand their impact on team psychological safety. Contact FactorFactory to learn how multi-rater assessment data can help your leadership team move from intention to evidence.