Part 1: The Power and Peril of Naming Over the past five years of our work in psychological safety, it has transformed from a little-known term, understood and explicitly practised by only a small group of researchers and practitioners, to […]
Blog Archives
Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety There really is some bad advice and research around in respect to psychological safety, in particular how it relates to aspects of neurodiversity and culture. In this piece, we’re going to dive […]
Psychological Safety Is Necessary But Not Sufficient. We sometimes hear “But psychological safety isn’t enough!”, and well… Obviously. It’s rather like saying that having a fully functioning car isn’t enough to make a road trip – and of course it […]
Every year we hold Psych Safety Days and other events for our wonderful community to come together, share insights, learn new practices and examine emergent research and evidence. These are grass-roots, practitioner-led events that are inclusive and accessible for all. […]
The Amagasaki Derailment In our workshops and training, we often use real-world stories as a way to explore the dynamics of both failure and success. Stories are a powerful tool to help us reflect on our own experiences, and sometimes […]
There isn’t a “one-size-fits-all”, cookie-cutter, road map approach to psychological safety. There are some foundational practices and principles, but the experience of psychological safety, and how it manifests, is different for everyone. Our background, culture, neurodiversities, abilities, needs and preferences […]
Psychological Safety Books for Children In 2020, we shared a collection of the best books about psychological safety. As new books were published (and there have been a lot of them about psychological safety!), we’ve added to and refined the […]
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2025 – the largest global survey on psychological safety ever! Psychological safety is the core ingredient behind high-performing, innovative, and happy teams. It shapes whether we feel safe speaking up, sharing ideas, […]
Barriers to Psychological Safety Executive Summary This research explores the experiential barriers to speaking up at work: not just structural or cultural factors, but the lived fears and beliefs that inhibit voice and learning. Drawing on responses from 138 participants, […]
How you respond matters. “Everything you do is important to your organization. People are watching you. The people in your organization determine how to move forward after both successful work and how to recover after failure by watching how you […]
Executive Summary This study examined which practices most effectively foster psychological safety in teams and organisations. While behaviours such as listening and empathy underpin interpersonal safety, practices (structured, named activities like retrospectives or social contracts) create the scaffolds and shared […]
Executive Summary This study explored how feedback in the workplace affects both performance and psychological safety. While feedback is intended to drive growth and improvement, its delivery often has mixed results. Based on responses from 61 participants, the findings show […]
Psych Safety Day 2025 was wonderful! Malaga and Seville were gorgeous, very hot, and a fabulous way to wrap up 2025 and begin looking forward to what’s happening in Psych Safety for 2026. And if you’d like to have your […]
Executive Summary This study examined the relationship between job security and psychological safety, challenging the common assertion that “psychological safety is not job security.” While the two concepts are distinct, the findings suggest that perceptions of job insecurity (such as […]
Executive Summary In this Research Pulse, 121 respondents were asked how familiar people in their workplace are with the concept of psychological safety. The results show a broadly “middle-ground” distribution: most people have heard of it, but few would call […]
Executive Summary This study explored why people foster psychological safety, examining whether motivations are primarily moral, relational, or performance-driven. While psychological safety is often discussed in terms of its organisational benefits: innovation, learning, quality, and performance, this research highlights the […]
You Can’t Fix A Secret There is a particular kind of organisational silence that looks, from the outside, like stability. No complaints. No incident reports. No difficult conversations. Everything, apparently, fine. It isn’t fine. It’s just hidden. The most dangerous […]
Cultural Diversity and Cockpit Communication Here’s a classic paper from 1999 – Cultural diversity and crew communication, by Fischer and Orasanu. They examined how cultural background, rank and gender influence pilots’ corrective communications in the cockpit. Analysing over 500 pilots […]
Why Just Culture Isn’t Sticking by Tom Geraghty What Do We Mean by “Just” Culture? The concept of a “Just Culture” was first developed in James Reason’s 1997 book Managing the Risks of Organisational Accidents. When we say “Just Culture”, […]
“Sociological” Safety By Tom Geraghty The term psychological safety has been in use since Carl Rogers’ work in the 1950s and was applied to organisational contexts by Schein and Bennis (among others) in the 1960s. Since Amy Edmondson’s influential research […]
Guest Post By Jason Rawding Humour and Psychological Safety Being funny at work can feel a bit risky – especially in front of a group, or in an email that many people will see. In trying to make others laugh, […]
Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) During my ecology degree, whilst studying ecosystem and habitat change, I learned about Self-Organised Criticality (SOC), and I was fascinated by how it explained the precursors to seemingly dramatic changes. We first discussed Self-Organised Criticality in this […]
We all are. Do only leaders influence psychological safety? Is psychological safety “done to us”? Well, yes and no. Leaders have a significant influence on psychological safety, but they’re not the only contributor, by a very long way. Firstly, psychological […]
Comfort vs Need by Tom Geraghty What do we do when the things that help some people in the team feel psychologically safer don’t work for everyone? Perhaps one person says they need time away from the main meeting group […]
The Organisational Fabric of Psychological Safety (AKA psychological safety is more than just a team phenomenon) By Tom Geraghty When we talk about psychological safety, the definition we usually use is something along the lines of “a shared belief that […]
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