Psychological Safety

Amy Edmondson defined team psychological safety as "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking". Asking a question, reporting an error or challenging a plan each risks looking ignorant or difficult in front of colleagues; when that risk feels high, people tend to stay quiet, and the team loses exactly the information it needed. In her study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company, psychological safety was associated with learning behaviour, and learning behaviour mediated between psychological safety and team performance.

Google's re:Work guide on its team-effectiveness research, code-named Project Aristotle (the guide was first published in 2015), says the researchers studied 180 teams and found that what mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together. Of the five dynamics it lists in order of importance, psychological safety comes first, defined with Edmondson's wording.

Felt Accountability: in a three-year study of 545 New York City public schools, Higgins and colleagues found the best performance where psychological safety was relatively low and felt accountability relatively high, not where both were high as Edmondson's model predicts; they liken safety to "a pinch of yeast", so when results lag, raise accountability for shared goals before adding comfort (Academy of Management Discoveries, 2022).