Psychological Safety

After your onboarding at a new job, it’s time for your first meeting with your new team. You’re excited to ask questions about your role and share ideas for smoother operations. Yet as soon as you do, your new manager shuts you down and says, “We have our ways here, and we’re not interested in how you would do things differently.” You’re disappointed, or even feeling punished for sharing your thoughts. Your new workplace has failed to promote psychological safety, as you feel put down instead of genuinely valued for your openness. 

Psychological safety is the blueprint for teams and organizations to feel open to ask for help, bring up worries, confess mistakes, make suggestions, and challenge the organization and others in their team.¹ When this direct openness is present, the result is fewer risks, new ideas, and true innovation where everyone on the team plays a part. At its best, psychological safety makes individuals feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks without consequences while improving outcomes for an organization. Considering this concept might cause you to reflect on times where you had psychological safety, or perhaps you more easily remember times where it was clearly missing for you or a coworker. 

Psychological safety is not as simple as “everyone is nice.” Instead, it is felt when individuals feel they can brainstorm thoughts, challenge conventions, give feedback, and actively disagree.² It is important to distinguish psychological safety relative to what a high amount of trust at work looks like. A key difference between these concepts is that psychological safety explains how beliefs and values define group norms, while trust emphasizes the beliefs that people have about each other.¹ True psychological safety emerges when everyone feels they know that others will perceive their ideas, questions, worries, and errors in a non-judgmental way. Here are a few indicators of when psychological safety is present or absent:

How Psychological Safety Involves Everyone at Work

Psychological safety is a team effort, not just an individual one. Reflecting on how it is distinct from trust, which involves how one employee perceives another, psychological safety is about defining group membership and how it feels to be a part of a team, through open communication. Psychological safety is not something that merely goes downstream from management to employees. Rather, leaders, employees, and the organization itself must all be proactive in the process of fostering genuine psychological safety by mutual empathetic listening. Let’s take a closer look at how both leaders and employees can grow psychological safety while the organization can further support this initiative for a healthy work culture:³

The Four Stages of Psychological Safety

Aside from involving all team members in implementing psychological safety, it is crucial to integrate it through concrete stages, with the basis of feelings of belongingness.² The building blocks of psychological safety and its presence are spelled out in the four stages of psychological safety.1, 2Developed by psychologist Timothy Clark,the four stages of psychological safety are inclusion, learner, contributor, and challenger safety. These stages describe the journey from feeling accepted to feeling safe enough to challenge the status quo. Each stage builds one’s confidence to engage, grow, and speak up without fear of embarrassment. Let’s take a closer look at these stages and some tangible examples:

What psychological safety looks like in contemporary work culture is always evolving, as we now work in both in-person and virtual environments. Studies on this phenomenon range from Google’s Project Aristotle, which describes psychological safety as the most important factor for effective teams, to healthcare studies showing it improves patient safety outcomes.^4,5 Organizations across various sectors now prioritize building a culture of trust and respect, with growing opportunities for cultivating psychological safety not only to improve team effectiveness, but for innovation, well-being, and long-term organizational success.