Psychological Safety

Why this factor may be the most important factor in team performance

A term first used in 1999 has become a popular trend – because the research shows that this is critical to team performance.

The term psychological safety has had a boom recently stimulated in large part by Google’s internal research which showed that this was the most important factor for successful teams.

This ties in nicely with the big theme of this series of posts on fear. Safety is absence of fear, and this also shows why fear is so detrimental to personal and organisational performance. But psychological safety is not just safety but the personal safety of, as Google put it: taking risk without being feeling insecure or embarrassment. This therefore extends the concept of safety to a security in speaking out, being oneself, and being accepted. It is lack of threat of the S in SCOAP, Self-Esteem – you are a valued person irrespective of what you say.

Though psychological safety feels like a common trend, its roots are apparent in research stretching back decades. Schein and Bennis in their famous organisational work in the 1960s alluded to the importance of being accepted and worthwhile. Deming included this in his famous 14 points for management written in 1982. But the term was formally proposed by Amy Edmondson of Harvard in a paper in 1999.

This has since become the working definition of psychological safety and also how to measure this.

These questions are the questions Amy Edmondson uses to measure psychological safety: