Psychological Safety vs Psychosocial Safety

You’ve probably heard of psychological safety, and you may also have heard of “psychosocial safety”. In this piece, we’re exploring what psychosocial safety actually is, and how it is different to psychological safety.

In Australia, “psychosocial safety” is now a legal requirement. Since April 2022, changes to the Work Health and Safety (WHS) Regulations have required employers to identify and control psychosocial hazards that can negatively impact employees’ mental health and wellbeing. These hazards include bullying, harassment, excessive job demands, job insecurity, and poor organisational management. The reforms made psychological health a central safety concern, placing it alongside physical safety in regulatory terms and putting the onus on EHS/OHS teams to address.

Partly as a result of this regulatory change, the terms psychological safety and psychosocial safety are sometimes used interchangeably or even conflated. There is also a growing tendency in organisations to use “psychological safety” as a catch-all label for anything related to stress, wellbeing, or mental health, and to use “psychosocial safety” when referring to interpersonal team climate. This inaccurate epistemological drift causes confusion, obscures accountability, and often results in important hazards being overlooked.

The two concepts are indeed related (both deal with people’s experience of work), and one can affect the other, but they are not the same.

Psychological safety is the safety (not necessarily comfort) in taking interpersonal risks, whilst psychosocial safety is safety from psychological harm such as burnout, undue stress, and impacts on mental health. The two are related, of course, in part because a lack of psychological safety can lead to psychosocial harm if we’re not safe to speak up about concerns or ask for help.

What is Psychological Safety?

The term psychological safety originated in therapeutic settings, and matured in organisational research, most prominently through the work of Harvard professor Amy Edmondson in the late 1990s. Edmondson defined it as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

At its core, psychological safety describes the group-level climate that shapes whether individuals feel able to speak up (not necessarily verbally), ask for help, challenge ideas, raise concerns or admit mistakes without fear of humiliation, exclusion, or negative consequences for their status or career.

Just a few key features of psychological safety include:

• People openly acknowledging errors and treating them as learning opportunities.
• Team members feeling able to ask “naïve” questions or propose novel ideas.
• Leaders and team members modelling fallibility and actively inviting input.
• Dissent and different opinions are embraced rather than rejected.
• Workers are open about workarounds and deviations.
• People can “speak up” (not necessarily verbally) in ways that suit them best.

The primary focus of psychological safety is interpersonal behaviour in groups.

What is Psychosocial Safety?

In contrast, psychosocial safety arises from the domain of occupational health and safety and refers to the management of psychosocial hazards: the organisational, social, and job design factors that may cause harm to psychological and mental health.

These hazards are often systemic and environmental rather than purely interpersonal. They include:

• High or conflicting job demands
• Low control or autonomy over work
• Poor support from supervisors or colleagues
• Insecure employment conditions
• Bullying, harassment, or organisational injustice
• Poorly managed organisational change
• Isolated and remote work for long periods
• Poor work environments – noise, or heat or cold, for example
• Dysfunctional or harmful relationships with others in the workplace

International frameworks such as the World Health Organization’s guidelines on mental health at work, the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Management Standards and ISO 45003:2021 provide structure and guidance for identifying and controlling these hazards.

In contrast to psychological safety, psychosocial safety is framed in terms of a legal and moral duty of care. Employers are obligated to create conditions that do not endanger the mental health of their workforce.

Key Differences

Though both concepts concern wellbeing at work, their emphases diverge in important ways:

• Level of analysis:
  • Psychological safety → the emergent disposition within groups that shapes interpersonal risk-taking.
  • Psychosocial safety → organisational and systemic conditions that protect mental health.
• Risks addressed:
  • Psychological safety → risks of exclusion, rejection, or career impacts when speaking up.
  • Psychosocial safety → risks of stress, burnout, anxiety, depression and other harms from job design and organisational culture.
• Responsibility:
  • Psychological safety → emergent, co-created by leaders and team members in daily interactions.
  • Psychosocial safety → primarily the mandated responsibility of employers to manage hazards under health and safety law.
• Measurement:
  • Psychological safety → team surveys, interviews, observation of behaviours.
  • Psychosocial safety → risk assessments, compliance audits, benchmarking against standards (e.g. ISO 45003).

In practice, psychosocial safety measurement is often reactive and risk-based (identifying hazards, assessing controls, ensuring compliance), whereas psychological safety measurement is more proactive and behavioural (observing interaction patterns, testing whether voice is genuinely enabled).

Both are necessary, but they are not interchangeable terms.

Common Misconceptions

• Psychological safety does not mean a facade of comfort or artificial harmony – it means freedom to take interpersonal risks.
• Psychosocial safety is not a wellbeing perk – it is a regulated safety obligation grounded in duty of care.
• Psychological safety doesn’t replace hazard management; it allows it to succeed.
• A psychosocially safe workplace can still have low psychological safety if voice is discouraged or punished.
• High psychological safety does not cancel out structural stressors such as excessive job demands, isolated work or job insecurity.

Why the Distinction Matters

Failing to accurately distinguish between psychological and psychosocial safety risks leaving critical gaps unaddressed. Consider these two scenarios:

• High psychological safety, low psychosocial safety: A healthcare team feels comfortable raising concerns, challenging authority, and admitting mistakes. However, chronic understaffing, long shifts, and relentless workloads create psychosocial hazards that undermine wellbeing and lead to burnout.
• High psychosocial safety, low psychological safety: A software company has strong anti-bullying policies, reasonable working hours, and job security. Yet within one group, junior engineers are reluctant to contribute ideas because there’s a perception that you have to “earn” the right to suggest ideas.

In both cases, the absence of one undermines the benefits of the other. Organisations require both strong psychosocial safety (structural protection from harm) and psychological safety (a climate that enables voice and learning).

How Psychological and Psychosocial Safety Interact

Psychological and psychosocial safety are mutually reinforcing but can also erode one another.

Poor psychosocial safety (e.g. job insecurity, excessive pressure, unmanaged change) can undermine psychological safety, as employees become less willing to take interpersonal risks in uncertain or stressful environments. Conversely, lack of psychological safety can worsen psychosocial hazards, because employees may not feel safe to report bullying, harassment, or unmanageable demands – allowing those risks to persist, and worsen, unchecked.

Some factors bridge both domains. Role clarity, for example, is certainly a psychosocial safety issue — a matter of job design and organisational structure. But when roles are ambiguous or constantly shifting, people often hesitate to ask questions or challenge decisions for fear of overstepping, which undermines psychological safety.

This is why some hazards appear twice: once as structural risks, and again as inhibitors of interpersonal risk-taking.

Addressing only one is insufficient.

Practical Guidance

• Undertake psychosocial risk assessments as part of regular health and safety processes.
• Apply frameworks such as ISO 45003 or the HSE Management Standards to identify and mitigate hazards.
• Train managers to recognise psychosocial risks (e.g. workload, job insecurity) and act appropriately.
• Integrate psychosocial safety into governance and compliance structures, not as an HR initiative but as part of core safety management.
• Questions for leaders:
  • For psychosocial safety: “Where are our biggest job design hazards? What creates unnecessary stress or uncertainty?”
  • For psychological safety: “When did we last explicitly invite dissent or uncertainty? How do we respond when someone admits a mistake?”

Psychological safety and psychosocial safety are related but distinct

Psychological safety is about the group-level climate that makes it safe to speak up. Psychosocial safety is about the organisational duty to prevent harm from systemic and job design risks.

Confusing them risks creating blind spots: workplaces where people feel able to speak but are overwhelmed by stress, or environments that look safe on paper but stifle voice and innovation.

Further Reading:

• The Workplace Psychological Safety Act
• Good Management Saves Lives https://psychsafety.com/good-management-saves-lives/
• Daniels, D. Psychosocial Hazards are Real. 2025
• HSE. (2004). Management standards for work-related stress. Health and Safety Executive, UK.
• International Organization for Standardization. (2021). ISO 45003:2021 Occupational health and safety management — Psychological health and safety at work — Guidelines for managing psychosocial risks. Geneva: ISO.
• Safe Work Australia. (2022). Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work. Canberra: Safe Work Australia.
• WHO. (2022). Guidelines on mental health at work. Geneva: World Health Organization.