Psychological safety
A belief shared by the members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, such as admitting error, asking questions and challenging. It predicts team learning and performance. It is independent of standards, and high safety combined with high standards is the learning zone.
Evidence grade: research Peer-reviewed or large-sample empirical work supports it.
Use it when
Always. It is the precondition for every honest signal this standard depends on: bad news, dissent, blameless reviews, upward feedback.
Where it stops working
It is a different thing from niceness, comfort or an absence of conflict. Measured badly, it flatters itself, and in an organisation that is unsafe even anonymous surveys read too high.
Where the standard uses it
- CC-1Psychological safety and productive conflictSafe to speak, expected to disagree, committed once decided.
Sources
- Amy C. Edmondson. Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383, 1999. In the bibliography
- Amy C. Edmondson. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley, 2018. In the bibliography
Used alongside it
- Blameless postmortems practice
- Conflict then commitment practice
- The five keys of team effectiveness research
- Trust as a behavioural account practice
Cite this model
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Psychological safety. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, TEC.psychological-safety). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/techniques/psychological-safety