Psychological Safety — Your questions answered
This article originally appeared at ScienceForWork; the version below has been adapted and expanded.
Psychological safety gets another look.
Although the concept of psychological safety has been around since the 1960s, it recently came storming into the mainstream through research by Amy Edmonson at Harvard, as well as Google's research on high-performing teams. In this article, however, I'll summarize findings from a new meta-analysis on the topic by Lance Frazier and colleagues (2017). They reviewed samples from 117 studies representing over 22,000 individuals and nearly 5,000 groups.
Specifically, I’ll review the answers to six important questions about psychological safety in light of these findings. Keep in mind, most of the studies included in the meta-analysis were cross-sectional, so we cannot make causal conclusions from these findings. However, we can better understand some of the factors that may contribute to psychological safety, as well as its potential outcomes.
One: What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety relates to a person’s perspective on how threatening or rewarding it is to take interpersonal risks at work. For instance, is this a place where new ideas are welcomed and built upon? Or picked apart and ridiculed? Will my colleagues embarrass or punish me for offering a different point of view, or for admitting I don’t understand something?
You might be thinking, “Is this just a fancy way of saying trust?” Although trust and psychological safety have a lot in common, they are not completely interchangeable concepts. A key difference is that psychological safety is thought to be experienced at the group level — most people on a team tend to have the same perceptions of it. While trust usually relates to interactions between two individuals or parties (Edmondson, 2004).
Two: What benefits might arise when psychological safety exists?
Psychological safety may help to create an environment conducive to learning. Frazier and colleagues found it was strongly linked to information sharing as well as learning behaviors. Practically speaking, this might look like a team where members are more likely to discuss mistakes, share ideas, ask for and receive feedback and experiment. Sounds like a great team! Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be surprising that psychological safety is also strongly linked to employee satisfaction!
Three: What might help to cultivate psychological safety?
Psychological safety is strongly associated with role clarity and peer support. You can probably see the logic in this. If you have a good understanding of what’s expected of you on the job and feel encouraged by your colleagues, you may feel more confident speaking up, as well as be more supportive when others do so. Additionally, the degree of interdependence on a team may play a role. For instance, if the team is one where you must count on your colleagues to get the job done, psychological safety may be more likely to develop, than on a team where most folks can complete their tasks without much help from others.
Four: Does national culture make a difference?
If you work outside your home country, or in a culturally diverse team, should you think about psychological safety differently? Frazier and colleagues offer initial evidence that suggests, “Yes!” Specifically, they looked at how the role of psychological safety may differ based on “uncertainty avoidance”(UA), i.e., how much people prefer a structured and defined environment. People in high UA cultures tend to value stability, formal rules and social norms (e.g., Germany and Japan). Those in low UA cultures tend to be relatively more informal and unstructured (e.g., US and Denmark). In sum, this study indicates that psychological safety may be even more important in high UA cultures, where individuals may be culturally predisposed to avoid the type of risk-taking required to ask questions, contribute ideas and offer productive challenge to their colleagues.
Five: Can you have too much psychological safety?
Unfortunately, research to date has not yet adequately investigated if there are potential downsides to psychological safety. For instance, could it be linked with an increased likelihood of unethical behavior? Are there potential consequences for individuals, beyond what they may experience as part of their team, that should be accounted for when taking interpersonal risks? Although there is a growing body of support for the productive role of psychological safety, it’s also important to keep in mind such unanswered questions.
Six: How do you gauge a team’s level of psychological safety?
There are a variety of ways to evaluate the level of psychological safety of a group or team. The six survey questions used by Amy Edmonson in her research are used widely and have been validated.
Psychological Safety Survey Questions (7 pt scale — Very Inaccurate to Very Accurate)
If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
It is safe to take a risk on this team.
It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.
In addition to psychological safety itself, many tools also ask questions about related factors that tend to influence psychological safety — such as goal clarity, team leader behaviors — and outcomes associated with psychological safety — team learning behavior or a team’s sense of its ability to get the job done (efficacy). Examples are below; the full survey is available here.
Clear Direction: This team has invested plenty of time to clarify our goals.
Organizational Supportiveness: This team gets all the information it needs to do our work and plan our schedule.
Team Leader Coaching: The team leader initiates meetings to discuss the team’s progress.
Team efficacy: With focus and effort, this team can do anything we set out to accomplish.
Team learning behaviors: In this team, someone always makes sure that we stop to reflect on the team’s work process.
In sum
Are you interested in building a team where people ask questions, seek feedback, are willing to experiment, and aim to learn from mistakes? Then make sure it feels rewarding rather than threatening for team members to do so. To cultivate psychological safety on your team, you may want to consider:
Clarifying roles. Ensure team members understand their respective roles and responsibilities, as well as how they contribute to the team’s purpose.
Modeling the way. Leaders can help set the tone by being curious, asking questions, and exhibiting tolerance for mistakes.
Considering national culture. A sense of peer and organizational support may be particularly relevant in developing psychological safety in cultures that value stability and rules.
For more ideas, you may want to check out this guide from Google’s re:Work.
This article was originally published on November 17, 2017; it was updated on July 21, 2022.
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References
Edmondson, A. C., Kramer, R. M., & Cook, K. S. (2004). Psychological safety, trust, and learning in organizations: A group-level lens. Trust and distrust in organizations: Dilemmas and approaches, 12, 239-272.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta‐analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113-165.
Guide: Understand team effectiveness. (n.d.). Retrieved August 28, 2017, from https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/identify-dynamics-of-effective-teams/
Kim, S., Lee, H., & Connerton, T. P. (2020). How psychological safety affects team performance: mediating role of efficacy and learning behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1581.