Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. In teams, it refers to team members believing that they can take risks without being shamed by other team members. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected. It is also the most studied enabling condition in group dynamics and team learning research.
Psychological safety benefits organizations and teams in many different ways. There are multiple empirically supported consequences of a team being psychologically safe.
Most of the research on the effects of psychological safety has focused on benefits, but there are some drawbacks that have been studied.
Overview
Psychological safety has been an important discussion area in the field of psychology, behavioral management, leadership, teams, and healthcare. Results from a number of empirical studies conducted in various regions and countries show that psychological safety plays an important role in workplace effectiveness (Edmondson and Lei, 2014). It has consistently played an important role by facilitating ideas and activities to a shared enterprise. It also enables teams and organizations to learn and perform and in recent years, it has become a more significant organizational phenomenon due to the increased necessity of learning and innovation.
History
The term 'psychological safety' was coined by the psychologist and psychotherapist Carl Rogers in the 1950s in the context of establishing the conditions necessary to foster an individual's creativity. According to Rogers, psychological safety is associated with three processes: accepting the individual as of unconditional worth; providing a climate in which external evaluation is absent; and understanding empathically. Hubert Bonner, a professor of psychology at Ohio Wesleyan University used the term in the context of human needs for security. In addition to physiological and safety needs, he wrote, an individual needs to believe in something to feel secure, even clinging to those beliefs in the face of contrary evidence, because they provide "psychological safety".
In the context of "laboratory training" and T-groups to effect organizational change, Schein and Bennis, in 1965, defined it as "an atmosphere where one can take chances (which experimentalism implies) without fear and with sufficient protection (...) thus a climate is built which encourages provisional tries and which tolerates failure without retaliation, renunciation, or guilt".
Point 8 of W. E. Deming's 14 Points For Management, written in 1982, of "Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company" highlights a similar growing realisation, in contrast to previous Taylorist management approaches, that the creation of environments where it is interpersonally safe to raise concerns is of crucial importance to realising high quality business outcomes.
Explicit interest in psychological safety was renewed by Kahn in the 1990s, through qualitative studies which showed that psychological safety enables people to "employ or express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally". This was in parallel with emerging progressive management paradigms at the time such as safety culture and the Toyota Production System (TPS) that introduced a physical representation of psychological safety, the Andon Cord, which explicitly provides employees with the empowerment to raise issues or concerns.
Social aspects
Psychological safety is a group-level phenomenon. Research on team effectiveness emphasises input-process-output (IPO) models, and some studies see psychological safety as an input that promotes team performance through team learning as a mediator (process).