Who gets to decide if psychological safety matters?

Is scepticism about psychological safety a luxury position?
What the LinkedIn discourse reveals about who has positive or negative opinions on psychological safety, and why it might matter more than we think.

Psychological safety is one of the most discussed (and critiqued) concepts in the workplace. It generates a vast amount of research papers, conference talks, podcasts, blogs and videos, and an almost continuous stream of LinkedIn posts. But the conversation about psychological safety is also a thing in its own right, distinct from the concept itself. So we wanted to ask who is actually having it, and what do they think?

To do this, we carried out a small exploratory study into the LinkedIn discourse around psychological safety: who is talking about it, what they are saying, and whether patterns emerge around gender and organisational position. 

Executive summary

This exploratory study analysed sentiment in 14 LinkedIn threads discussing psychological safety, covering approximately 170 substantive comments from around 200 unique authors across 12+ countries. We coded sentiment and inferred demographics from names, profile photographs, and job titles.

Three distinct discourse communities emerged: an advocacy stratum, an academic-critical stratum, and an inner circle stratum.

The data directionally supports a privilege hypothesis: scepticism about psychological safety appears to correlate with societal advantage. In regard to professional status, senior academics and executives are the most negative groups; clinical and operational safety professionals are among the most positive. With regard to gender, women are substantially more positive (55%) and less negative (9%) than men (42% positive, 24% negative). The single most over-represented group among negative voices is senior men, who account for 46% of negative comments despite being a much smaller share of the dataset overall.

The most significant finding may be structural: the people most likely to benefit from psychological safety (junior employees, frontline workers, those in genuinely unsafe workplaces) are almost entirely absent from the LinkedIn discourse. The conversation is conducted among the relatively privileged, largely in the absence of the people it is ostensibly about.

Methodology

We manually collected 14 LinkedIn threads in which psychological safety was discussed substantively through March 2026 – the criteria were that there had to be more than 15 comments on it, more than a day old at the time of collecting them, and the posts were not explicitly promotional or commercial. The Linkedin threads were selected to represent a range of post authors, sectors, and audience types. This gave us the best chances of analysing the most substantive posts. 

Some important context to add. I’m a practitioner, researcher and facilitator in the psychological safety field, with an active (though somewhat reluctant) LinkedIn presence including in threads of the type analysed here. I am, in other words, part of what I’m describing. That seemed worth saying out loud: who gets to write a piece about who is having the conversation is itself a question about who is having the conversation. Also, as a practitioner in this space, I sit in the “advocacy” stratum, and by my own hypothesis, that is precisely the stratum most likely to hold positive views about psychological safety. To manage that bias where possible, my own comments have been excluded from the dataset. 

Across the 14 threads we collected approximately 320 comments, of which around 170 were substantive (through excluding tag-only entries, hashtag-only comments, and too-brief affirmations) from around 200 unique authors (after excluding commercial actors – a small number of individuals who used comment threads to promote their own products or services rather than engage substantively). One commercial actor appeared across five separate threads with near-identical promotional content. This itself is an observation that says something about the commercial ecosystem that has grown around psychological safety.

We used Linkedin names, profile photographs, and profile text to infer the various demographics that we’re interested in – gender, seniority and job function. Gender presentation was inferred from typical first name conventions, and profile photos were used to increase confidence. We wanted to look at ethnicity too, and tried name origin as a proxy. However it was, frankly, too crude, even if only treated as directional. So we left it out of the findings. Seniority and function were established from LinkedIn headlines and job titles. We coded comment sentiment into five categories: positive, mixed, negative, contextualising, and affirmation only. Comment sentiment was coded using an AI assistant (Claude, Anthropic), with categories reviewed and verified by the team.

There are some key limitations, of course: LinkedIn itself is a platform of the already relatively privileged. The most marginalised voices (junior employees, frontline and gig-economy workers, manual workers and tradespeople, for example) are much less likely to be on LinkedIn discussing the concept. This is not an incidental limitation. It is, in fact, part of the finding.

Three distinct discourse communities

One of the clearest patterns to emerge was that the LinkedIn psychological safety conversation is not one conversation. It is at least three almost distinct conversations running in parallel, with limited crossover.

The first is an advocacy stratum: these are posts by practitioners, coaches, healthcare workers, HR professionals, organisational leaders and more who are broadly positive about psychological safety and engage with fostering psychological safety as a practical concern. The post authors were predominantly women, and generated little negative sentiment in the comments: negative sentiment was only around 3% of organic comments across these advocacy threads.

The second is an academic-critical stratum: posts by researchers, scholars, and subject matter experts who engage critically with psychological safety – its evidence base, construct validity, and the various claims made about it. This stratum generated a high proportion of mixed and contextualising sentiment, suggesting genuine intellectual engagement and interest in the concept. It also contained the most methodologically rigorous engagement with the concept in the dataset, and several of the critiques raised deserve serious attention. It was also the most negative stratum in the dataset, with approximately 38% of comments expressing critical or negative views. The commenters were predominantly men.

The third is an inner circle stratum: posts by and around the psychological safety field’s most prominent figures: people who have written books and built professional identities around the concept. This stratum, predictably, was almost entirely positive. It generated the highest engagement figures and the least substantive debate. When a concept reaches this mature stage of its life, much of the conversation around it largely functions as a community of agreement, which is neither sinister nor surprising. It is, however, worth noticing.

Three strata, three different conversations, with surprisingly little crossover between them. The advocacy stratum generates warmth, support and agreement. The academic-critical stratum generates intellectual friction. The inner circle generates celebration. It’s the same concept with three almost completely separate conversations. 

It’s worth noting that these strata are descriptive rather than fixed categories – individuals move between them, and occupy more than one at once. We use the framing as a way of seeing the discourse, not as a claim about stable groupings of people.

The privilege hypothesis

Our core research question was whether patterns exist linking gender, ethnicity, and position in the organisational hierarchy (a proxy of positional/formal power) to sentiment about psychological safety. We had a working hypothesis that we considered this data might disprove: 

People who are most sceptical of PS tend to be those for whom speaking up has been, or is, less costly. 

This may be (typically, but not always) men, people from non-marginalised backgrounds, those in secure, senior or tenured positions, and people operating nearer the “blunt” end of organisations rather than the “sharp” end.

The data supports this hypothesis directionally, with some caveats, namely that the demographic categories were inferred rather than self-reported, the sample is small enough that subgroup percentages should be read as indicative rather than precise, and LinkedIn is itself a platform of the relatively privileged – which means the full range of the pattern we’re describing is likely underrepresented in the data rather than overstated. With that in mind, the findings were as follows.

On gender, the pattern was a consistent finding in the dataset. Women were substantially and consistently more positive about psychological safety (approximately 55% positive) and substantially less negative (approximately 9% negative) than men (approximately 42% positive, 24% negative). This gap was widest in the academic-critical stratum, where men were around twice as likely as women to express outright critical or negative views about psychological safety. This is an interesting pattern that supports the privilege hypothesis.

Figure 1: Sentiment by gender. Women and men are roughly equally represented in mixed and contextualising comments; the gap appears almost entirely at the two ends, with women leaning positive and men carrying most of the negative sentiment.

On seniority and positional power, the pattern was the most striking. Using a blunt-end to sharp-end framing borrowed from Human and Organisational Performance (where blunt end describes those furthest from the work, and sharp end those closest) the gradient was very clear. Academics were the most negative group in the dataset at approximately 48% negative. Founders and C-suite executives came next at approximately 20%. In contrast, workers closer to the “Sharp End”, such as clinical NHS staff, operational safety professionals, and frontline practitioners were among the least negative at approximately 6%. 

Figure 2: Sentiment by organisational position. The gradient runs the way the privilege hypothesis predicts: positivity rises and negativity falls as we move from blunt end towards sharp end. 

At least on Linkedin, it appears that the people who are most sceptical of PS tend to be those with the most institutional power. The people who appear most enthusiastic for it are those whose working lives most regularly involve the difficult and precarious dynamics that a lack of psychological safety describes: very hierarchical environments (where they are typically lower) and less agency in rapidly changing, complex, sometimes high-risk, environments.

It is worth acknowledging one obvious objection directly. Is it possible that the negative sentiment groups are simply more knowledgeable about psychological safety, and that their scepticism reflects greater expertise rather than greater privilege? The data can’t rule this out. However, the advocacy stratum contains clinical psychologists, safety scientists, NHS consultants, and human factors specialists: people with deep professional knowledge of the conditions that psychological safety describes. The academic-critical stratum contains organisational psychologists and management researchers whose expertise is in the evidence base, though not necessarily in the lived experience of the concept. These are different kinds of knowledge, and neither outranks the other. A surgeon who has spent twenty years navigating the dynamics of clinical hierarchy understands something about psychological safety that a management professor who has read every paper on it may not. A nurse who has seen a colleague punished for raising a concern knows a lot that a think-piece cannot capture.

The hypothesis is not that critics are ignorant. The hypothesis is that those who engage most critically with psychological safety tend to be people whose professional lives have not required them to test the concept against personal cost – that this shapes which questions feel urgent to them, and which feel abstract. For the people at the sharp end, psychological safety isn’t abstract, it’s very real, and incredibly important.

Figure 3: The composition of positive and negative voices, broken down by gender and seniority. Broadly, women and non-senior people are more likely to feel positively about psychological safety. Senior men make up 11% of positive comments and 46% of negative ones. 

Who isn’t in the conversation

As we mentioned, there is also another angle that the data points towards.

The people that the hypothesis most predicts would be positive about psychological safety: junior employees, frontline workers, and people in genuinely unsafe workplaces, are broadly absent from this dataset. LinkedIn is by its nature a platform of the relatively privileged. A warehouse worker, in one of the threads, described starting a new job and being laid off seven days later. They had heard all the right language about psychological safety from their employer in those seven days and they were one of the very few genuinely front line voices in the entire dataset. Their working life is the kind of life this discourse is supposedly about, but their voice is the kind of voice the discourse mostly doesn’t contain. The people who get hurt by low psychological safety at work are not in this conversation whilst the people who write articles about it (like me) are. The lack of these voices is an important finding in itself.

The popular psychological safety discourse is a conversation among the relatively privileged, conducted almost entirely in the absence of the people it’s ostensibly about.

If scepticism about psychological safety is correlated with more rarely having needed it (as this data suggests), that is not an argument that psychological safety is unimportant, not real, not useful or is invalid. It’s an argument that those doing the most publicly sceptical work are operating from a position of structural advantage that may well be invisible to them. 

Reading the pattern

The data shows that the distribution of sentiment across the LinkedIn psychological safety discourse isn’t random, and that the pattern of who feels positively about psychological safety and who does not correlates with structural characteristics in ways that are hard to explain without reference to lived experience. People who operate in environments where speaking up is potentially higher stakes, such as clinical staff, operational safety professionals, people further down organisational hierarchies, are more consistently positive about psychological safety than those who do not. That pattern is consistent across our Linkedin thread analysis, as well as our previous research on socioeconomic background and willingness to take interpersonal risks at work.

None of this is claiming that sceptics of psychological safety are wrong, or that their critiques lack substance. Some of the most intellectually serious engagement with psychological safety in our dataset came from the academic-critical stratum, and several of those critiques around measurement confounds, misinterpretation and misapplication, and the gap between some claims and evidence are valid critiques and deserve engagement. We often find ourselves saying the same thing as the critics.

Neither is it claiming that being senior and male makes someone’s views on psychological safety invalid.

The privilege hypothesis is one explanation, but not the only one. Several alternatives plausibly account for at least part of the pattern. Academia rewards critique, and the professional incentives of research careers may shape how scholars appear to engage with applied concepts. The advocacy and academic strata may also simply differ in their relationship to the concept: practitioners use psychological safety as a working tool, while academics tend more to study it as a body of literature, and people who use a concept practically tend to be more positive about it than people who study it in the abstract. Some scepticism is also likely an understandable reaction to concept dilution (due to the wellness industrial complex, the LinkedIn thought-leadership ecosystem, and the commercialisation of the term) rather than to the genuine underlying construct. 

We don’t think any of these alternatives entirely displace the privilege hypothesis. The pattern we’ve identified is consistent with several explanations, not just one. What we are confident about is that there is a pattern worth paying attention to, and that the absence of frontline voices from the discourse is significant regardless of which causal story best explains the rest.

Scepticism about psychological safety, then, may be a luxury position. One can afford to question whether psychological safety matters when speaking up has rarely cost you much. 

The question worth asking

What people say about psychological safety on LinkedIn tells us something, but certainly not everything, about what people experience in workplaces. In a subsequent piece, we will explore the different types of scepticism we surfaced: the various distinct critiques, their positions, intellectual grounds, and what psychological safety advocates might learn from them.

For now, the conversation about psychological safety is happening. This isn’t a debate about whether psychological safety is “real” or not – it’s about how much it matters to us. And maybe it matters most to those for whom the stakes are highest – to the people we are least likely to hear from. Which is, of course, the point.

“…the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
Walt Whitman

This research was conducted using publicly available LinkedIn posts and comments. All individuals have been anonymised. Demographics were inferred and should be treated as directional only.