The Best Books About Psychological Safety

The Psychological Safety Book Club

Updated November 2025. We love nothing more than reading fantastic books that help us to understand (and explain) concepts around psychological safety even better. The list below includes many of our current favourite books about psychological safety, and the core texts that we use in our training, but it is by no means exhaustive, and we always love to get new book recommendations from our wonderful community. If you have some of your own suggestions to share, please join the community or get in touch!

We also have a list of the best psychological safety books for children!

Where books show the “core text” icon, it means they’re a core recommended reading text as part of our corporate training and online workshops.

The Fearless Organisation by Amy Edmondson

The essential book on Psychological Safety. Dr Edmondson covers the research and theory, examples of failure where a lack of psychological safety was (at least in significant part) a component cause, as well as demonstrating the successes that result from environments of high psychological safety. This book contains excellent insights and actions that you will take away and be able to implement with your teams, whether you’re in a leadership role or not. If you’re going to read anything on psychological safety, it should be this book.

Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein

In this classic, Ed Schein describes the approach of asking over telling, and in particular, how to ask questions that draw on curiosity and interest to generate bold new ideas, avoid disastrous mistakes, and develop agility and flexibility in your teams.

Confronting Mistakes by Jan Hagen

This is a fantastic and highly readable book about the causes of aviation disasters – specifically faulty communication and failure to speak up – that were exposed by the use of black box technology. As a result, the aviation world introduced Crew Resource Management: a set of principles and training practices that encourage speaking up, and crucially, the creation of environments in the air and on the ground that encourage people to speak up.

The 5 Principles of Human Performance, by Todd Conklin

This book should be required reading for any management training course. Todd summarises eloquently, accessibly, and engagingly the 5 principles of Human Performance (subsequently widely known as HOP). It’s a wonderful discourse on the fundamental philosophy of the progressive, systemic and collective view on safety in the workplace.

The Essential Mary Parker Follett Ideas We Need Today, by François Héon, Albie Davis, Jennifer Jones-Patulli and Sébastien Damart

Mary Parker Follett (MPF) is the OG of organisational psychology, leadership and power dynamics. Writing over 100 years ago, she surfaced ideas that were counter to the conventional thinking of the time, as espoused by Taylor and Ford. Drucker, Deming, Schein and many others have credited MPF as being their guru, guide, and one of the greatest (and forgotten) thinkers and writers.

Her papers have been collated into a book called “Dynamic Administration“, but this aggregation of Mary’s insights, themed by topic, is a much more accessible way in. Our workshops and training courses utilise many of MPF’s concepts, especially those on the distribution and sharing of power in organisations.

The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan

Diane Vaughan’s The Challenger Launch Decision offers a detailed sociological analysis of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Instead of attributing the tragedy to a single decision-maker’s error or outright negligence, Vaughan highlights a complex organisational culture at NASA in which small rule-bending behaviours—what she calls “the normalisation of deviance”—became accepted practice over time. Engineers and managers gradually adjusted to increasingly risky conditions as normal, losing sight of just how dangerous their actions had become.

This organisational climate had significant implications for psychological safety. In the Psychological Safety online course, this example is used to explore broader organisational aspects of psychological safety, outside of immediate teams.

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

The academic field of psychological safety suffers from a lack of insight around cross-cultural differences between people and teams. Erin Meyer’s excellent book provides some excellent examples of the different communication and work norms around the world. It’s an excellent way in to help us realise that psychological safety looks different for everyone!

The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker

This is an excellent book about the “fallacy” of human error. Definitely worth reading if you work in safety critical environments, and very useful even if you don’t.

The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’ will help you understand how to move beyond ‘human error’; how to understand accidents; how to do better investigations; how to understand and improve your safety work. You will be invited to think creatively and differently about the safety issues you and your organisation face. It will influence your own thinking and practice, as well as that of your colleagues and organisation. If you are faced with a ‘human error’ problem, abandon the fallacy of a quick fix.

Turn The Ship Around by David Marquet

Whilst David doesn’t discuss psychological safety by name in Turn the Ship Around, what he did with his crew and his approach to leadership are very much psychologically safe approaches to high performance leadership. A very accessible book, highly readable, and provides a lot of actionable takeaways.

Take it even further by reading David’s follow-up to this, “Leadership is Language“, which is excellent and also very actionable.

Complexity: A Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell

In our workshops and training, we take a complexity-informed view of organisations, so for those who want to dive deeper into what complexity means in practice, this is an excellent and rigorous account of the scientific field of complexity. Melanie Mitchell shows that it’s possible to explain complex systems science with rigour, breadth, depth, and clarity. A very good introduction to complexity. Easy to read, and doesn’t restrict itself to one discipline, and definitely has enough for any reader to gain a good grasp of the main areas of complexity.

Complexity, a Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell

Oops! Why Things Go Wrong by Niall Downey

Errors, just like death and taxes are inevitable. In this book, Niall describes his experiences in both healthcare and aviation, and how core practices and cultures can create environments that are not only safer, but higher performing too.

Inclusion on Purpose by Ruchika Tulshyan

This is an excellent and challenging book by Ruchika. She offers six strategies for turning empathy into action–be uncomfortable, reflect on what you don’t know, invite feedback, limit defensiveness, grow from your mistakes, and expect change to take time–and encourages readers to examine how policies or assumptions that seem “normal” can cause unintended harm. For example, she describes a workplace where social events always included alcohol, thus excluding employees whose religion, culture, or health kept them from drinking. Tulshyan recommends acknowledging such mistakes, identifying the biases that may have driven them, and working to do better.

Radical Candor, by Kim Scott

Radical candor seeks to help us find the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. This is a great book, although the term “radical candor” is sometimes misinterpreted to mean “brutal candor”, which can be weaponised. As Kim points out in later editions, a more apt term might be “compassionate candor”.

The Psychological Safety Playbook by Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman

A general guide to some practices, behaviours and techniques that can help foster psychological safety in a range of work teams. This is a useful, short practical guide and also has wonderful illustrations!

Restorative Practice by Lesley Parkinson

I love Lesley’s approach to making restorative practice actually practical – from civility to circle meetings. So much of this book spoke to me, but especially the framing of failure that, as humans, we are certain to err – we can try not to, but we will. We are however in control of how we respond to failure – restorative practice can help us define what a positive response to failure looks like when it happens to us or those around us.

Speak-Up Culture: When Leaders Truly Listen, People Step Up by Stephen Shedletzky

Speak-Up Culture is a must-read for any leader or manager who wants to create a more open, honest, and collaborative work environment. This book contains a great collection of stories, theories and concepts, and also consists a practical guide that offers real-world examples and tools to help leaders foster a psychologically safe culture where everyone feels safe and empowered to speak up.

Under Pressure by Gareth Lock

An interesting dive (ha!) into how human factors, psychological safety, expertise and interpersonal dynamics integrate into the world of sport diving. There are some great takeaways here for those who like to explore parallels to the world of work from other domains.

Under Pressure by Gareth Lock.

The Four Stages of Psychological Safety by Timothy R. Clarke

All models are wrong, and some are harmful. We include this primarily because it’s very well known – however: use with caution. The linear 4 stages model fails in practice, and the book has a highly neurotypical, westernised, “leaderism” stance.

It describes the the journey of a team through Tim Clarke’s “4 Stages” model of psychological safety, with echoes of Tuckman’s Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing model. Easily readable, though ultimately the model itself lacks evidential basis.

Wrong, but interesting.

What Have We Missed?

If there’s a book that’s transformed your understanding of psychological safety, we’d love to hear about it. Get in touch and we’ll review whether we can add it to the list!

Unlocking the power of psychological safety for your team

If you’re feeling inspired by all this reading and you’re ready to put the theory into practice with your own team and organisation, take a look at our Psychological Safety Action Pack and Practice Playbooks. These toolkits offer a wealth of practical resources to guide you on your journey to understanding, measuring, building and maintaining psychological safety in your teams.

agile measurement performance psychological safety teams work

Tom Geraghty

Tom Geraghty, co-founder and delivery lead at Iterum Ltd, is an expert in high performing teams and psychological safety. Leveraging his unique background in ecological research and technology, Tom has held CIO/CTO roles in a range of sectors from tech startups to global finance firms. He holds a degree in Ecology, an MBA, and a Masters in Global Health. His mission is to make workplaces safer, higher performing, and more inclusive. Tom has shared his insights at major events such as The IT Leaders Summit, the NHS Senior Leadership Conference, and EHS Global Conferences. Connect with him on LinkedIn or email tom@psychsafety.com