Psychological Safety in the Workplace: Benefits, Research, and How to Build It

Article by Assad Schuitema

There is a substantial and growing body of research linking psychological safety to improved learning, innovation, engagement, collaboration, retention, and team performance. The significant impact of psychological safety on team effectiveness has now been recognised for nearly three decades.

For example, Amy Edmondson’s foundational 1999 research on psychological safety[1] found a strong relationship between psychological safety, the prevalence of learning behaviours, and team effectiveness.

The learning behaviours observed included:

• admitting mistakes,
• asking for help,
• challenging ideas,
• offering suggestions,
• and raising concerns openly.

Her research demonstrated the following relationship:

Higher psychological safety → greater prevalence of learning behaviours → higher team effectiveness and performance.

What is Psychological Safety?

Amy Edmondson defined psychological safety as:

A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

Practically speaking, this means that individuals in a team feel safe enough to:

• speak honestly,
• ask “stupid” questions,
• admit mistakes,
• disagree respectfully,
• offer dissenting views,
• or raise concerns

…without fear of embarrassment, rejection, punishment, or humiliation.

It is important to understand, however, that psychological safety is not about being nice, avoiding tension, or lowering standards of accountability. In many respects, it is the opposite. Psychological safety creates the conditions for people to confront what needs to be confronted.

Paradoxically, psychological safety may sound “soft” because it is associated with safety and support. Yet on the other side of psychological safety lies a certain hardness: the candour, honesty, challenge, and accountability that become possible only when people feel safe enough to speak openly.

What is the Core Benefit of Psychological Safety?

Perhaps the most fundamental benefit of psychological safety is candour. Psychological safety creates an environment in which people feel safe enough to tell the truth openly and constructively.

This candour expresses itself in three directions:

• leaders feel safer giving direct and honest feedback,
• colleagues feel safer challenging one another and admitting mistakes,
• and employees feel safer speaking openly upwards towards leadership, particularly when raising concerns, disagreeing, or acknowledging errors.

In many respects, the first casualty of low psychological safety is the truth — especially up the line. When psychological safety is compromised, people become reluctant to speak honestly when things go wrong. As a result, leadership is often left unaware of underlying problems until it is too late.

Research by Amy Edmondson and others found that teams with high psychological safety often report more problems and mistakes — not because they experience more of them, but because people feel safer acknowledging them openly. This openness enables teams to respond to problems earlier, learn faster, and improve more effectively.

How Other Benefits does Psychological Safety Have?

On the back of the openness and candour enabled by psychological safety, a wide range of additional organisational benefits can be expected. There is now extensive research documenting these benefits across a variety of organisational contexts.

For example, Frazier et al. (2017)[2] conducted a major meta-analysis and found that psychological safety is positively associated with:

• employee engagement,
• information sharing,
• task performance,
• creativity,
• and learning behaviour.

Carmeli, Reiter-Palmon, and Ziv (2010) found that psychological safety significantly increased employee involvement in creative work and idea generation.[3]

Cauwelier, Ribiere, and Bennet (2019) found that psychological safety positively influenced team knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in engineering teams.[4]

Broadly speaking, research has linked psychological safety to a number of important organisational benefits, including:

• greater innovation and creativity,
• improved collaboration and knowledge sharing,
• higher employee engagement,
• lower burnout,
• stronger employee retention,
• and improved team performance.

Psychological Safety, Trust, and Intent

Clearly, insofar as psychological safety is not merely about “being nice,” it must be rooted in something deeper than surface-level behaviour. Psychological safety does not flourish simply because people are polite to one another. Rather, it flourishes where there is genuine interpersonal trust.

In his early work within the South African mining industry, Etsko Schuitema observed that trust emerged as one of the most significant variables associated with conflict and breakdown in workplace relationships.

Subsequent research[5] has strongly corroborated this broader insight. Research has consistently linked trust to:

• improved cooperation,
• stronger communication,
• greater knowledge sharing,
• and higher levels of team effectiveness.

Conversely, low-trust environments are associated with:

• defensive behaviour,
• withholding information,
• escalating conflict,
• and reduced psychological safety.

In many respects, psychological safety can be understood as a product of interpersonal trust — particularly trust in leadership. It emerges when individuals believe that their leader has a genuine interest in their well-being and development, and is willing to place the needs of the team above personal ego, self-interest, or agenda.

The Connection Between Psychological Safety and Intent.

Psychological safety can be understood as one of the natural outcomes of leadership rooted in the intent to give. When leaders are genuinely committed to the growth, success, and well-being of their people — rather than merely extracting performance or advancing personal interests — interpersonal trust begins to develop.

It is this trust that creates the conditions for psychological safety to flourish. People become more willing to speak honestly, admit mistakes, raise concerns, challenge ideas constructively, and engage openly in learning.

From this perspective, psychological safety is not merely the product of communication techniques or leadership behaviours in isolation. More fundamentally, it emerges from the perceived intent of the leader. When people experience leadership as genuinely being “there for them,” openness, accountability, learning, and collaboration become significantly more possible.

How to Build Psychological Safety.

Once we recognise the connection between psychological safety and the intent of the leader, we begin to appreciate how subtle the challenge of cultivating psychological safety really is.

This is because psychological safety is not ultimately produced by systems, policies, or processes alone. More fundamentally, it is shaped by the perceived intent of the leader within the team. If a leader is experienced by his or her people as fundamentally self-serving, then no organisational initiative, policy, or training programme can fully compensate for this absence of trust.

Put simply, when a leader loses the trust of his or her people, the organisation loses them too.

Importantly, this issue operates at a deeper level than behaviour alone. Most people can recognise the difference between genuine care and performative niceness. We have all encountered individuals who are consistently polite, respectful, and professionally appropriate, yet still evoke distrust.

This is because people are highly sensitive to sincerity. We instinctively assess whether a person is genuinely there for us, or whether their apparent care is ultimately in service of themselves.

From this perspective, sincerity becomes a measure of intent. The principle of sincerity may be expressed as follows:

The degree to which you are sincere with me is the degree to which you are willing to suspend your own agenda for mine — or for what is right.

Where this sincerity is present, trust deepens. And where trust deepens, psychological safety becomes possible.

This suggests that the key to cultivating psychological safety lies, fundamentally, in cultivating servant leadership — leadership rooted in the intent to give to people rather than merely getting results from them. Such leaders are experienced as being “there to give” to their teams: to support, develop, equip, and enable them to succeed.

This implies a significant shift in how leadership has traditionally understood its role within modern organisations. Leaders often see themselves primarily as accountable for results and, as a consequence, position themselves towards their people in ways that unintentionally undermine trust. Yet where trust is weakened, psychological safety is weakened also. In this sense, an excessive fixation on results can ironically erode the very relational conditions required for sustainable high performance.

Conclusion.

Psychological safety is not something that can be manufactured through policies, communication techniques, or superficial niceness alone. Rather, it is an outcome — a relational condition that emerges from the way people experience the intent of their leader.

Research has consistently shown that psychological safety enables honesty, learning, collaboration, innovation, and high performance. At its core lies candour: the willingness of people to speak openly, admit mistakes, challenge ideas, raise concerns, and tell the truth — particularly when things go wrong.

Yet this openness depends fundamentally on trust. People become psychologically safe when they believe that their leader is genuinely “there for them” — committed not merely to extracting results, but to contributing to their growth, success, and well-being. In this sense, psychological safety is ultimately rooted in leadership intent.

This shifts the challenge of cultivating psychological safety to a much deeper level than behaviour or organisational systems alone. The key question is not simply whether leaders behave politely or communicate effectively, but whether people experience them as sincere, trustworthy, and fundamentally committed to serving the team rather than themselves.

From this perspective, psychological safety can be understood as one of the natural outcomes of Care and Growth leadership — leadership rooted in the intent to give.

[1] Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

[2] 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.

[3] Carmeli, A., Reiter-Palmon, R., & Ziv, E. (2010). Inclusive Leadership and Employee Involvement in Creative Tasks in the Workplace: The Mediating Role of Psychological Safety. Creativity Research Journal, 22(3), 250–260.

[4] Cauwelier, P., Ribiere, V., & Bennet, A. (2019). The Influence of Team Psychological Safety on Team Knowledge Creation. Journal of Knowledge Management, 23(6), 1157–1175.

[5] Dirks, K. T., & Ferrin, D. L. (2001). The Role of Trust in Organizational Settings. Organization Science, 12(4), 450–467.