Psychological safety is the foundation teams need to function
In my work on workplace culture, I keep seeing the same thing.
Before teams can collaborate well, challenge decisions, learn from mistakes or improve performance, psychological safety and trust between colleagues have to be in place.
Not layered on later.
Not introduced through a workshop.
In place first.
This isn’t just anecdotal. It is strongly supported by organisational psychology research, particularly the work of *Amy Edmondson, which shows that teams perform better when people feel safe to speak up, ask for help and admit uncertainty.
Psychological safety is not about comfort.
It is about permission.
Why psychological safety is the basic requirement
Psychological safety creates the conditions for everyday behaviours that teams rely on:
Speaking up early about risks and concerns
Asking questions without fear of judgement
Challenging poor decisions constructively
Sharing unfinished ideas
Learning from mistakes rather than hiding them
Research consistently shows that these behaviours are linked to higher team learning, adaptability and performance (Edmondson, 1999; Frazier et al., 2017).
Without psychological safety, these behaviours don’t disappear.
They go underground.
What I see when safety and trust are missing
In teams where psychological safety is low, I regularly see:
Silence in meetings
Defensive communication
Blame and justification
Information hoarding
Cliques and in-groups
People carefully managing how visible or vocal they are
From a psychological perspective, this is predictable.
When people don't feel safe, they move into threat response states. Research in social neuroscience shows that perceived interpersonal threat reduces cognitive flexibility, working memory and openness to others (Rock, 2008; Lieberman, 2013).
In these conditions, people prioritise:
Self-preservation
Reputation protection
Avoiding risk
Not shared goals.
Why team performance suffers as a result
Teams operating in threat states can still look functional on the surface:
Meetings happen
Targets are met in the short term
Policies are followed
But the underlying cost is high.
Research shows that low psychological safety is associated with:
Lower learning behaviour
Reduced voice and challenge
Increased error concealment
Lower engagement
Slower improvement over time
This helps explain why highly capable teams can struggle for years without obvious technical problems. The issue is not skill. It is the environment those skills are operating in.
Psychological safety as a mechanism, not a buzz phrase
Recent research reinforces that psychological safety is not a “soft” outcome. It is a mechanism.
Studies show that:
Inclusive leadership improves performance through trust and psychological safety, not independently of it
Psychological safety mediates the relationship between inclusion efforts and engagement
Teams with higher psychological safety adapt more effectively in complex, high-pressure environments
In other words, inclusion initiatives do not work as intended without safety. Diversity without psychological safety increases risk rather than reducing it.
What leaders do instead
Leaders often focus on structures, roles and capability first.
In psychologically unsafe cultures, this rarely works.
Leaders who create effective team conditions tend to focus on:
How disagreement is handled, not whether it exists
How mistakes are responded to, especially by senior people
Who gets listened to, not just who speaks most
What happens after someone raises a concern
Practically, this looks like:
Modelling uncertainty and fallibility
Responding to challenge with curiosity rather than defence
Intervening early in undermining or dismissive behaviour
Making it safe to raise issues before they become incidents
This is not about being permissive.
It is about being predictable and fair.
The bottom line
Psychological safety is not the outcome of good teamwork.
It is the condition that makes good teamwork possible.
Without it, teams default to fear, self-protection and self-interest.
With it, people can focus their energy on the work rather than on staying safe.
References
*Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
*Edmondson, A., & Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 23–43.
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.
Rock, D. (2008). SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. NeuroLeadership Journal, 1, 44–52.
Lieberman, M. D. (2013). Social: Why our brains are wired to connect. Oxford University Press.
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