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.

Interpersonal Risk-Taking: Team members take risks in expressing ideas or admitting mistakes, knowing that they won’t face humiliation or retaliation. For instance, you admit you misunderstood a task deadline, and instead of being blamed, your team calmly helps adjust the timeline and shares similar past slip-ups.
Open Communication: Employees openly share ideas, feedback, and concerns without fear of negative consequences, promoting transparency and innovation. For example, you voice concerns about a proposed direction when planning strategy, and your feedback sparks a productive discussion that leads to a better plan.

Empathetic Listening: Leaders and colleagues practice active listening with empathy, ensuring that individuals feel understood and valued. When you share that you’re overwhelmed with your workload, your manager listens without interrupting, acknowledges your stress, and you collaborate on solutions together.

Personal Engagement: The emotional and cognitive energy someone brings to their work.⁶ The concept, coined by William Kahn when studying how engaged people are at their job, goes beyond just doing the job, extending engagement to showing up with curiosity, purpose, and presence.

Psychological Empowerment: The internal sense that your work is meaningful and that you can make an impact. It’s fueled by autonomy, competence, and the belief that your voice matters.⁷

Fault-Tolerant Culture: A workplace culture that treats mistakes as learning moments rather than punishable offenses.⁷ It creates space for open dialogue and measurable success, where early errors lead to faster adaptation.

The open, non-judgmental reality of psychological safety was not always a given. While originally coined by psychologist Carl Rogers in 1954 in the context of the ideal therapeutic relationship, the roots of psychological safety in the workplace can be traced back to organizational psychology studies from the 1960s, where researchers first explored how safe interpersonal environments impact collaboration and innovation. In 1965, MIT professors Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis claimed that psychological safety was necessary for people to find security and adapt their behaviors when organizational issues arose.⁸ Furthermore, they said that psychological safety is a way to mitigate anxiety by making an individual feel both accepted and valued.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that psychological safety came to the forefront of workplaces and work culture itself. Psychologist William Kahn reignited interest in the term as he looked into personal engagement at work in 1990, redefining it as being able to show one’s true self without worrying about consequences relative to profession, prestige, or perception of self.⁶ Kahn’s spin on psychological safety describes how much people can express themselves mentally and emotionally in their role, instead of backing out or feeling defensive. In two unique contexts of summer camps and architecture firms, Kahn demonstrated how when workers are engaged, involved, and trusted, they are more themselves at work—a concept closely linked to psychological safety. Soon after, psychological safety became clearly described in numerous group settings.

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson brought the concept of psychological safety mainstream in her seminal 1999 paper, linking it to team performance and learning behaviors.⁹ When researching clinical teams and how many mistakes they made, Edmondson and her colleagues were shocked to discover that the more mistakes a given team made, the higher the number of positive outcomes occurred, relative to those with a lower number of mistakes. Upon further investigation, it was the teams that admitted to their mistakes that yielded better outcomes, while the teams that covered up their mistakes had fewer good outcomes. This led to Edmondson’s interpretation of psychological safety as the belief that there will not be punishment or embarrassment when expressing ideas, questions, worries, or mistakes themselves. In other words, a psychologically safe workplace is one that is a safe space for taking interpersonal risks without judgment.

In the 2010s, Google's in-depth study on team effectiveness titled Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the most crucial factor for high-performing teams.⁴ This landmark finding cemented the concept’s relevance in modern workplaces, instead of only being known in academic contexts. Drawing inspiration from Aristotle’s notion of “the whole being greater than the sum of its parts,” Google found that better results come about when working in a team rather than alone. True to Edmondson’s original findings, the project found this to be especially evident when psychological safety is present: everyone feels comfortable taking risks and being vulnerable, and mutual respect is felt.

What feeling psychologically safe at work means is a dynamic concept, changing with the pace of work and the increasing need to be inclusive of diverse identities. With the rise of agile work practices and remote teams, psychological safety gained traction as a core component of resilient and innovative workplaces. Companies across sectors, from tech to healthcare, began investing in leadership training to foster safer environments.As workplaces become more diverse, psychological safety has become a critical element in DEI strategies, ensuring that individuals from various backgrounds feel safe to share their perspectives without fear of discrimination. Leaders and organizations will need to continuously adapt to provide genuine psychological safety that meets the unique needs of their employees in the evolving future of work.

Carl Rogers

An American psychologist and psychotherapist known for his influence on a humanistic, person-centered approach to therapy. Rogers coined the term “psychological safety” when he was improving conditions of therapy, describing a scenario where someone feels unconditional worth in an environment free of external judgements.9

Edgar Schein

A Swiss psychologist and pioneer in organizational culture, Schein highlighted psychological safety as essential for open communication and learning in an organization.⁸ His work shows that safety reduces fear-driven behaviors.

Warren Bennis

An American scholar and leadership expert, Bennis emphasized trust and openness as key to creating psychologically safe environments.⁸ He highlighted how leaders can foster safety through transparency.

William Kahn

An American organizational psychologist who was the first to define psychological safety in the workplace, linking it to feeling safe taking interpersonal risks, crucial for engagement and authenticity.

Amy Edmondson

An American professor at Harvard Business School who popularized the concept of psychological safety, demonstrating its impact on team performance and learning. Edmondson’s research shows that psychologically safe teams learn, collaborate, and innovate more effectively.

Psychological safety has a profound impact on team dynamics and organizational performance. When individuals feel safe to share ideas and take risks without fear of judgment, collaboration and innovation thrive.

Better Team Performance

Teams with high psychological safety are more likely to share ideas, collaborate, and take risks, leading to greater creativity and higher overall performance, unburdened by the fear of judgment or humiliation. This has not only been the case in Edmondson’s original findings of higher performance, but in other contexts, too. Overall, research shows there are positive effects on team learning, efficacy, and productivity when psychological safety is present.¹⁰

For example, one study found that the presence of psychological safety in field sales and service in South Korea had a mediating impact on team performance relative to learning behaviors and group efficacy.¹¹ With a sample of over 100 teams, Kim et al. (2020) looked into various factors that impact team performance, discovering that psychological safety is the engine, not simply the fuel, of better team performance. In other words, psychological safety isn’t just a helpful add-on or a motivator—it’s actually the core mechanism that enables teams to function well. This study is just one of many contexts where psychological safety demonstrates its potential to increase a team’s belief in succeeding, ability to learn, and overall effectiveness. 

Open Feedback and Innovation

A psychologically safe environment encourages individuals to admit mistakes and seek feedback, which fosters ongoing learning and drives innovation within organizations. As simple as it sounds, we can all think of times where open feedback wasn’t seen or welcomed at work. With psychological safety, feedback is not only welcomed but integral, as people feel encouraged to give others constructive comments about where changes need to be made, including to upper management.¹²

Perhaps an easy way to appreciate this is to think of a time when you had a leader who didn’t provide the space for open feedback. How can this be remedied? Mental wellbeing is an ideal outcome with genuine psychological safety, and according to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, there are many ways for leaders to support mental health.¹² One specific means leaders can consider is making use of analytics and employee feedback to find out which behaviors are preferred from up top. In this sense, psychological safety ensures that constructive feedback is valued regardless of someone’s role or power. 

Improving Employee Well-Being

Psychological safety doesn’t just help teams perform better—it also plays a critical role in supporting employee well-being. When individuals feel safe to speak openly without fear of ridicule, rejection, or punishment, it reduces chronic workplace stressors such as anxiety and isolation. Employees in psychologically safe environments report higher job satisfaction, stronger workplace belonging, and lower levels of burnout. In fact, research has found that psychological safety acts as a buffer against the emotional exhaustion that can stem from high-pressure or unpredictable work settings.¹⁰

This is especially important in roles that involve emotional labor or complex interpersonal dynamics, such as caregiving, education, or healthcare. A psychologically safe environment allows employees to express vulnerability, seek help, and engage in meaningful dialogue—all of which contribute to mental health resilience and job engagement. Studies have even shown links between psychological safety and reduced turnover intention, as workers are more likely to stay in environments where they feel heard and valued.¹⁰ Simply put, investing in psychological safety is also an investment in sustainable well-being and employee retention.

Despite its benefits, psychological safety has limitations that can hamper its effectiveness, including the possibility of hindering performance despite being intended to help. If mismanaged, efforts to promote psychological safety may lead to complacency, groupthink, or even tokenism of specific employees.

Getting Too Comfortable

Excessive focus on psychological safety can lead to a lack of healthy conflict or challenge, potentially harming critical discussions and difficult decision-making. While it is first crucial to note that there is always a necessity for making workers feel safe, respected, and free from any form of abuse, there is still the possibility of a ceiling to psychological safety. A clear risk to job performance is the possible reality that there are “no bad ideas” when psychologically safe.¹³ In other words, there may be a high presence of psychological safety when there is the assumption of minimal consequences for subpar performance.

One way to interpret this limitation is complacency, or feeling too comfortable with not fearing criticism when ideas are shared. Research across hundreds of performance ratings in workplaces shows that psychological safety may have been taken too far in this regard, where some take this concept as a means to not follow rules or “get away” with poor performance.¹⁴ This study demonstrates how psychological safety is healthy in certain amounts, but when there is an excess, productivity and accuracy might take a hit. For these reasons, organizations must find a way to strike a balance between psychological safety and accountability. 

Candor vs. Coordination in High-Stakes Teams

Another important limitation of psychological safety lies in the tension between honesty and cooperation. High psychological safety often encourages individuals to speak freely, share dissenting views, and push back against group norms. While this can enhance innovation and help surface risks, it may also inadvertently undermine cohesion. In team settings that require high levels of synchronization, such as in healthcare or fast-paced project environments, too much emphasis on voicing opinions can slow down decision-making or lead to conflicting approaches that reduce overall efficiency. A study by Cappelli and colleagues suggests that teams functioning under pressure may suffer when psychological safety tips the balance too far toward constant critique and away from decisive action.14

This suggests that psychological safety isn’t a universal good in all contexts—it must be calibrated. In complex, fast-moving, or highly regulated environments, excessive freedom to challenge norms can create confusion or ambiguity in roles and responsibilities. When everyone feels empowered to critique without a parallel structure of alignment and follow-through, performance may suffer—not because team members aren’t competent or engaged, but because too much dialogue without direction leads to inertia. Psychological safety, then, must be carefully embedded within a culture of shared goals and operational clarity.

Superficial Psychological Safety: Risking Tokenism 

When organizations emphasize psychological safety without genuine inclusivity, they risk falling into tokenism—making symbolic efforts to appear diverse while maintaining underlying inequities. This superficial inclusion can lead to individuals from underrepresented groups feeling isolated and undervalued, as their presence is perceived as a mere compliance with diversity norms rather than a meaningful integration into the organizational fabric. Such practices not only harm the well-being of these individuals but also undermine the authenticity of the organization's commitment to diversity and inclusion.¹⁵

Moreover, tokenism can exacerbate stress and burnout among marginalized employees, who may feel pressured to represent their entire group and face heightened scrutiny. This dynamic contradicts the very essence of psychological safety, which aims to create an environment where all employees feel valued and secure. Organizations must move beyond performative diversity efforts by fostering genuine inclusivity and belonging, ensuring that psychological safety initiatives do not inadvertently perpetuate tokenism.¹⁶

Psychologically Safe Healthcare Settings

It is in the places where physical safety is being treated that psychological safety is most crucial. Healthcare workers across the globe are responsible for making sure we get the medical help we need, but it is also important to consider how levels of psychological safety in healthcare settings may influence workers themselves, as well as the patients they care for. One evidence synthesis of over 60 papers across nearly 20 countries investigated the impact of the presence or absence of psychological safety in healthcare settings.⁵ With overall positive findings, the authors also discuss areas with room for improvement. 

While looking at a variety of studies, a thematic analysis run by the authors investigated both high and low amounts of psychological safety at an individual participant level, as well as across the studies. About half of the studies used qualitative methods like semi-structured interviews, while the other half applied quantitative or mixed methods like surveys. From the synthesis of these papers, the authors found:

1. Ten studies demonstrated that low psychological safety can have a negative influence on patients’ feelings of safety. This may include staff being scared to speak up or being fearful of showing conflict in front of patients.
2. Nine studies showed that there is a notably positive relationship between the presence of psychological safety and better team outcomes. For example, collaborative decision-making and mutual understanding of each other’s roles.
3. Overall, healthcare workers who inspire higher amounts of psychological safety are critical to both efficient and safe healthcare practices. This also promotes organizational learning in the process.

When we find ourselves in walk-in clinics, hospitals, or emergency rooms—places in our communities where we need to feel safe and cared for—the psychological safety of those providing for us becomes paramount to our own mental and physical outcomes. In other words, the healthcare institutions, leaders, and frontline workers themselves must feel psychologically safe to make sure we are physically safe. Next time you find yourself in a doctor’s office or hospital waiting room, you might consider how critical it is that psychological safety in healthcare settings is effectively integrated and assessed.

Psychologically Safe Classrooms for Creativity and Problem-Solving

Psychological safety is a concept that can be expanded beyond the expected setting of a workplace. Another place that one may argue is even more important to have true psychological safety is the classroom. It’s often in educational settings—beginning in childhood and continuing into young adulthood—that we form our attitudes toward learning, expression, and the right to speak freely without fear of judgment, and educators play a key role in this development.  We can all reflect on times where (hopefully) a teacher told us we had a “great question” when we mustered up the courage to raise our hand for the first time, or on unfortunate instances of feeling shut down by teachers or other students. A study by Han et al. (2022) looked into how psychological safety has an impact on over 200 university students’ creativity when completing projects in China.⁷

Through a questionnaire, the authors found that there is indeed a positive correlation between psychological safety and creativity. In this study, there were three key questions:

1. In a project-oriented setting, what is the relationship between psychological safety and students’ creativity?
2. Is there a mediating role of psychological empowerment between psychological safety and students’ creativity?
3. Is there a mediating role of fault-tolerant culture between psychological safety and students’ creativity?

The results not only confirm that more psychological safety leads to more creative problem-solving when doing projects in classrooms, but also that the two mediating factors of psychological empowerment and fault-tolerance play key roles. When it comes to psychological empowerment, students who feel psychologically safe are further empowered; that is, they feel more open to expression and knowledge sharing, which gives rise to creativity in project-based learning compared to a psychologically unsafe environment. To expand on this finding, when there is room for fault—or simply put, the ability to make mistakes without judgment—there are also positive effects on psychological empowerment. 

This type of research sheds light on the importance of feeling psychological safety before we enter the workplace, while we are practicing and sharpening our ability to ask questions, share knowledge, and freely exchange ideas in educational settings. In an era of strong division of political opinions, it will be interesting to see how feasible it is to implement psychological safety in university settings, and even earlier stages of education, in the coming years. What we can hope for is classrooms, teachers, and classmates that are equally committed to educational experiences where psychological safety is organic for learning.

Zooming in on Psychological Safety in Virtual Teams

Can you recall a time when you joined a Zoom meeting and didn’t want to speak up? Many of us can. In this piece, TDL columnist Mariel Guevara discusses psychological safety in the workplace and how it looks in virtual settings, describing the four stages of psychological safety in the context of the digital interface. 

Psychological Safety in UX: Fostering Trust and Engagement 

When we experience digital products, we want them to be visually attractive, but a frequently neglected feature of the user experience (UX) is psychological safety. In this article, TDL columnist and UX Lead Maricela Arizaga defines psychological safety, its role in UX, the UX pyramid, and how to implement psychological safety into digital products.

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