The History of Psychological Safety

History of Psychological Safety

The History of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety has been discovered, named, absorbed by institutions, softened, rediscovered, and partially lost — at least three times. That is the actual history of the concept, and it is more interesting, and more cautionary, than the familiar arc from Rogers to Edmondson to Google to your organisation’s next leadership programme.

This is not a neutral history. We’ve been working in this field since 2019, building what we hope is a genuinely rigorous body of knowledge that resists the concept’s recurring tendency to be flattened into a checklist, a survey, or a keynote. Understanding where psychological safety came from — and what keeps happening to it — matters for understanding what it actually is.

The first coining: Rogers and the radical original

The term “psychological safety” itself was, we believe, first coined in 1954 by the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, in a paper later compiled in P E Vernon’s 1970 collection on creativity.

Rogers described psychological safety as a condition in which an individual feels they possess unconditional worth — accepted without conditions — in an environment deliberately free of external evaluation. For Rogers, safety was a prerequisite for creativity, authentic self-expression, and growth. It was, in its original formulation, deeply personal and explicitly anti-evaluative. The person must not be measured. The environment must not judge.

It is worth sitting with that for a moment, because the field that eventually inherited this concept would spend much of its energy designing measurement instruments and evaluation frameworks. The distance between Rogers’ original formulation and the contemporary PS industry is not an accident; it is the story.

Parallel traditions: the groundwork

Rogers was not alone. In the mid-twentieth century, several adjacent traditions were independently developing ideas that converged on what we now call psychological safety — each with its own politics, assumptions, and blind spots.

Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y (1960) argued that managers’ assumptions about workers — whether they are inherently untrustworthy or inherently motivated — fundamentally shape the climates they create. Theory X produces fear. Theory Y produces engagement. The insight was structural: safety or its absence is not an individual trait but a function of how authority chooses to exercise itself.

Kurt Lewin, often called the father of social psychology, contributed the equation B = f(P,E) — behaviour is a function of person and environment — and developed the “unfreeze–change–refreeze” model of organisational change, which depended on creating conditions safe enough for people to relinquish existing patterns.

Chris Argyris, from the 1960s onward, developed the concepts of defensive routines and double-loop learning. Without safety, organisations trap themselves in single-loop adaptation — fixing the symptom, never the cause. Argyris was particularly interested in the gap between espoused theory (what organisations claim to value) and theory-in-use (what their structures actually reward). That gap, he showed, is where safety goes to die.

The Tavistock Institute in London was developing socio-technical systems thinking, drawing on studies of coal mining and healthcare to demonstrate that effective performance required not just technical systems but psychologically safe participation from workers at every level.

Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis gave the concept its first explicit organisational definition in 1965, in their book Personal and Organisational Change Through Group Methods. For Schein and Bennis, psychological safety reduced “a person’s anxiety about being basically accepted and worthwhile.” Importantly, they positioned it as a group phenomenon — something created between people, not located inside them.

“A person’s anxiety about being basically accepted and worthwhile is reduced through psychological safety.” — Schein & Bennis (1965)

W. Edwards Deming, in his 1982 book Out of the Crisis, made the same argument from the opposite direction — not from psychology but from quality management. His eighth point: “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.” Fear suppresses information. Workers who fear consequences will hide defects, pass on problems, and tell managers what they want to hear. The result is systematic failure masquerading as normal operations.

“Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.” — W. Edwards Deming (1982)

What these traditions shared — and what they missed

It is worth naming, plainly, what these parallel traditions had in common beyond their insights.

They were almost exclusively Western. They drew on WEIRD research populations — Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic — and assumed that the organisational forms they were analysing were universal rather than culturally specific.

They were predominantly managerial in their framing. Even the most progressive thinkers in this tradition were primarily concerned with what organisations could do to enable their workers, rather than with what workers themselves understood safety to mean, or with how power structured who could ever be safe in the first place.

They were largely focused on professional, white-collar, and largely neurotypical populations. The coal miners at Tavistock were a partial exception — but even there, the researchers were not miners. The sharp-end workers whose safety was ostensibly at stake were the subjects of study, not its authors.

The history of psychological safety is also a history of whose safety was never really the subject of the research.

This matters not as historical criticism but as present-day orientation. The field’s structural absences at its founding are not corrected simply by adding diversity statements to training programmes. They require sustained attention to whose voices the existing frameworks were designed to surface — and whose they were not.

Safety science, aviation, and the sharp end

While the organisational psychology tradition was developing, parallel and largely separate work was underway in safety science.

In nuclear power, aviation, and healthcare, researchers were studying why some organisations maintained exceptional safety despite operating under conditions of extreme risk and complexity. The literature on High Reliability Organisations (HROs) — developed by Karl Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe, and others through the 1990s — emphasised open communication, deference to expertise regardless of hierarchy, and the systematic reporting of near-misses. All of this is impossible without psychological safety, though the HRO literature rarely used the term.

In aviation, Crew Resource Management (CRM) developed from the late 1970s in direct response to disasters — most notably Tenerife 1977, where post-crash analysis identified failure of junior crew to challenge a senior captain as a contributing factor. CRM explicitly sought to flatten operational hierarchies and create conditions where first officers would speak when they saw something wrong. The term “psychological safety” was rarely used. The practices were its direct precursors.

The Toyota Production System embedded similar principles structurally, through mechanisms like the Andon Cord — allowing any worker on the production line to halt operations if they identified a defect or safety concern. The Andon Cord is an important object in the history of PS because it is structural rather than cultural. It doesn’t ask workers to feel safe speaking up; it gives them a mechanism that makes speaking up the default action.

William Kahn and the individual dimension

William Kahn’s 1990 paper, “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work”, renewed academic interest in psychological safety. Kahn defined it as:

“the sense of being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status or career.” (Kahn, 1990, p.705)

Kahn’s formulation was primarily individual — a personal sense of safety — rather than the group phenomenon Schein and Bennis had described. He embedded it in a broader framework of psychological engagement, arguing that people bring more or less of themselves to their work depending on three conditions: meaningfulness, availability, and safety.

Kahn’s work was theoretically rich but empirically limited. It would take another decade and a very different methodological approach to establish the concept’s empirical foundations.

Structured timeline

1954 — Carl Rogers coins “psychological safety” in Toward a Theory of Creativity. The original formulation: unconditional worth, freedom from external evaluation.

1960 — McGregor introduces Theory X and Theory Y. Authority shapes climate.

1960s — Argyris develops defensive routines and double-loop learning. Fear suppresses organisational learning.

1965 — Schein & Bennis define psychological safety as a group-level phenomenon.

Late 1970s — Aviation develops Crew Resource Management in response to hierarchy-driven disasters.

1982 — Deming publishes Out of the Crisis: “Drive out fear.” Quality management arrives at the same conclusion via a different route.

1990 — Kahn defines psychological safety at the individual level in Academy of Management Journal.

1990s — HRO literature emerges (Weick & Sutcliffe). High reliability requires open information flow, which requires safety.

1999 — Edmondson publishes Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. The empirical turn.

2012–2016 — Google’s Project Aristotle identifies PS as the primary predictor of team performance.

2016 — New York Times article brings the concept into mainstream management discourse.

2018 — Edmondson publishes The Fearless Organization. Global management imperative — and the beginning of its most intensive period of commodification.

2019 — psychsafety.com launches. We begin building a body of work that tries to hold the concept’s complexity while engaging seriously with the literature.

2020 — COVID-19 exposes psychological safety as infrastructural rather than aspirational.

2021 — ISO 45003, the first international standard for psychological health and safety at work.

2022 — Australia WHS Regulations make psychosocial hazard management a legal requirement.

Amy Edmondson and the empirical turn

A key turning point came with Amy Edmondson’s 1999 study of hospital nursing teams, published in Administrative Science Quarterly. Working from an anomalous finding — teams that reported better relationships also reported more errors — Edmondson demonstrated empirically that psychological safety predicts learning behaviours and, through learning, team performance.

Edmondson explicitly defined it as a team-level construct: “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” By locating psychological safety at the team level and providing a measurement instrument, she made the concept empirically tractable in a way it had never been before. Tractable — which is to say: researchable. And, eventually, sellable.

That is not a cynical observation about Edmondson, whose work is genuinely important. It is an observation about what happens to concepts when they become measurable: they become manageable, which means they become a product.

Google, the New York Times, and the mainstreaming problem

Google’s Project Aristotle (2012–2016) identified psychological safety as the most significant predictor of team effectiveness across Google’s hundreds of teams. The 2016 New York Times article “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team” brought the concept to a business audience that had never encountered Kahn or Edmondson.

Edmondson’s 2018 book The Fearless Organization cemented psychological safety as a global management imperative. Google Ngram data (below) shows the term remaining relatively stable until around 2000, then climbing steadily, with dramatic acceleration between 2013 and 2022.

What that graph does not show is what happened to the concept as it mainstreamed. The management industry discovered psychological safety at the same moment it had largely given up on older frameworks for workforce engagement. It arrived with empirical credentials (Edmondson), a compelling business case (Google), and — crucially — a measurement instrument.

The result was predictable. Within a few years, psychological safety had become a leadership competency framework, a survey instrument, a training module, a consultancy offering, and a KPI. The concept that Rogers had defined precisely as freedom from external evaluation was being externally evaluated. The concept that Deming had described as incompatible with fear was being implemented by leaders whose power to create fear was the thing that most needed examining.

What we end up with, at the extreme end of this trajectory, is a programme designed by people who have never been the least safe person in any room they have entered, delivered to people who have, measured by a survey designed by the first group to confirm what the first group already thought.

The recent landscape: regulation, DEI, and what remains contested

Recent years have brought important developments, not all of them straightforwardly positive.

ISO 45003 (2021) and Australia’s Work Health and Safety Regulations (2022) represent the regulatory crystallisation of psychological safety. Floors matter: they protect people who might otherwise have no recourse. But regulation also crystallises concepts at a particular level of development. Once psychological safety is defined in a statutory instrument, the incentive to deepen understanding diminishes. What organisations often seek is compliance, not genuine transformation — and compliance-oriented PS looks remarkably like its pre-PS predecessor: a policy, a survey, an annual training module.

The intersection with diversity, equity, and inclusion has been one of the more productive recent developments. Without safety, marginalised voices are silenced; without genuine inclusion, safety is incomplete. The research is increasingly clear that psychological safety is not equally distributed within teams and organisations — it correlates with power, and those with the least power experience the least of it. This is not a peripheral concern; it is central to the concept’s meaning.

Our own LinkedIn discourse analysis found that scepticism about psychological safety on professional networks correlates reliably with markers of relative privilege: senior, managerial, and demographically dominant positions. Scepticism about psychological safety is, in part, a luxury position — available to those whose safety has generally not been the problem.

The DevOps literature, exemplified by the State of DevOps reports from 2019 onwards, has grounded psychological safety in operational consequence — deployment frequency, recovery time, change failure rate. Its limitation is the same as most technology-sector research: the population is neither representative of workers in general nor of those most exposed to the absence of safety.

Where we’ve taken it — and where the field needs to go

Over the past five years, we’ve watched the research and practice of psychological safety evolve, spread, and achieve extraordinary impact. We’ve also watched it drift, become commodified, and risk being hollowed out.

When we strip back the noise, what remains is this: psychological safety is not a diagnostic, a programme, a KPI, or a leadership fad. It is an emergent property of human systems, shaped by power, behaviour, context, difference and dissent. It is fostered not by roadmaps or surveys, but by learning, curiosity, empathy and care.

The next phase will be less about spreading awareness and more about deepening our collective understanding of what psychological safety actually means in practice. That means moving away from simple checklists and models, and attending to the complexity of human systems: attending to power gradients, embracing difference, and treating psychological safety as something that arises from lived interactions rather than from top-down initiative.

It also means a shift in focus from teams in isolation to the organisational fabric itself — the messy interfaces and organisational ecotones where most dysfunction, and most innovation, actually arises. Systems survive and thrive not through compliance but through constant human adaptation. That is an ecological observation, and it is why we consistently find ecological thinking useful here: not as metaphor, but as analytical lens.

This means, above all, a rights-based approach. Psychological safety is not simply a tool for optimising human performance. It is a right — a fundamental condition of human dignity at work.

The collective task is to hold that line: to keep psychological safety porous and evolving, to resist its commodification, and to build organisations where everyone, especially those with the least power, can speak up in the way that works for them, be truly heard, and know that their voice makes a difference.

Because if psychological safety only serves the powerful, then it isn’t psychological safety at all.