What is Psychological Safety?
How feeling safe to speak up changes how teams learn, grow and perform
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety is the shared belief that it’s safe to take risks, ask questions, admit mistakes, and share ideas without fear of blame or embarrassment.
It’s the difference between a team that speaks up early and fixes problems fast, and one that stays quiet until it’s too late.
When psychological safety is high, people contribute freely, learn from setbacks, and collaborate more easily. When it’s low, they hold back — not because they don’t care, but because the cost of speaking up feels too high.
The term was coined in 1999 by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, based on her work with medical teams. She describes it as “a team climate where people feel able to show and employ themselves without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status or career.
Edmondson’s work has since been backed by extensive research across industries. The CIPD’s 2024 Trust and Psychological Safety evidence review describes psychological safety as one of the most reliable predictors of team learning, collaboration, and innovation, not just better morale. When people feel able to speak up, organisations make faster, higher-quality decisions and adapt more easily to change.
Why it matters
As work becomes more complex, dispersed and changeable, teams need to adapt quickly. That means surfacing issues early, asking for help, and experimenting. Psychological safety is crucial for modern workplaces, especially for innovation, problem-solving, and performance. It creates:
Increased innovation and creativity
Better collaboration and engagement
Improved performance
Openness to different viewpoints and feedback
Recent studies have quantified the impact. The CIPD’s 2024 review found that teams with high psychological safety report stronger collaboration, faster problem-solving, and higher innovation scores — alongside measurable improvements in wellbeing and performance.
Research from Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the single biggest predictor of team effectiveness — more important than skill, experience, or structure.
Blue Ocean Brain reports that companies with strong psychological safety see 27 % lower turnover, 76 % higher engagement, and 57 % stronger cross-team collaboration.
It’s not about being “nice”
One of the biggest misconceptions is that psychological safety means keeping things comfortable. It doesn’t. It’s not about avoiding conflict or lowering standards. It's about having healthy disagreements without fear of retribution.
True psychological safety means people can disagree respectfully, challenge ideas, and give feedback without fear. It’s the foundation that allows healthy tension and honest debate to happen — safely. Or, as Edmondson puts it, “It’s about candour, not comfort.”
How psychological safety is different from trust
Psychological Safety is often confused with trust, but they’re different. Trust is a belief about another person’s reliability or intentions “I trust you.” Psychological safety is a shared belief about how others will respond to your behaviour “I feel safe to speak up here.” You can trust a colleague and still feel unsafe in a group that punishes mistakes or dismisses ideas.
Trust is personal and individual: “I trust you.” It’s about whether another can be relied on to do what they say they’ll do.
Psychological safety is collective, the whole team: “I feel safe here.” It’s about whether it’s ok to openly share ideas and make mistakes.
Another way to think about it: trust + inclusion = psychological safety. If people feel both accepted and respected, they can contribute without self-censoring.
Ask yourself: “How safe does it feel in my team to speak up, admit a mistake, or challenge an idea?”
What happens when it’s missing
When safety is low, people self-protect.
They hold back their best thinking, downplay concerns, or work around problems instead of raising them. Over time, this erodes learning, collaboration, and trust.
The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
Building safety takes time. Dr Timothy Clark describes four stages that teams move through as trust and openness deepen:
Inclusion Safety - feeling accepted and valued for who you are.
Learner Safety - feeling safe to ask questions, make mistakes, and learn.
Contributor Safety - feeling confident to add ideas and value.
Challenger Safety - feeling free to question and improve how things are done.
High-performing teams move fluidly between these stages, balancing comfort with stretch.
Four simple ways to start building psychological safety
Psychological safety doesn’t appear overnight — but small, consistent actions build it over time.
1. Model openness
Leaders set the tone. Admit when something hasn’t worked or when you don’t have all the answers. Simple phrases like “I might be wrong here…” or “What am I missing?” signal that it’s safe to question and learn.
2. Control your reaction to bad news
How you respond when things go wrong tells people whether it’s safe to be honest. Instead of “Why did this happen?”, try “What can we learn from this?” When you thank someone for surfacing a problem early, you encourage more of that behaviour.
3. Listen to learn
Genuine listening is one of the quickest ways to build safety. Slow down, ask open questions, and resist the urge to jump straight to solutions. Try asking:
“What’s your perspective?”
“What’s making this challenging?”
“What would you try if you could?”
4. Acknowledge effort and contribution
Recognition builds confidence. Be specific: “I appreciated how you shared that example; it helped everyone understand the issue.” Even when you don’t act on an idea, thank people for raising it. Feeling heard matters as much as being right.
In the next article, we’ll look at what leaders do often without realising it that builds or erodes psychological safety, and how small everyday behaviours can change everything.
A Final Thought
Psychological safety isn’t about lowering expectations; it’s what allows people to meet them. When people feel safe to speak up, they take ownership, experiment, and solve problems faster. And when leaders create that environment, one conversation at a time, teams don’t just perform better. They feel better.
These insights draw on Amy Edmondson’s pioneering research and the CIPD’s Trust and Psychological Safety (2024) evidence review - both showing that safety isn’t a “soft” idea but a hard-edge driver of performance and learning.
For more on Psychological Safety, read our other articles:
Polly Robinson, Growth Space
Would you like to build psychological safety in your workplace?
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